YUGEN Gallery will be holding Masumi Iwakawa's solo exhibition "BLOW" from Saturday, March 2nd to Monday, March 11th.
Lines and colors emit like improvisation
Masumi Iwakawa is a painter who is also a saxophone player. Abstract paintings depicting dynamic shapes and vivid color contrasts, as if emotions were poured onto the canvas, depicting portraits with closed-minded expressions, and fantastical images drawn using pop art techniques. . The artist's vitality is conveyed through her motifs and style, which are drawn as if she were improvising with various tensions and fluctuations of emotion.
``The feeling of running the brush and applying color is similar to playing the saxophone. My style as an artist is largely derived from music,'' she says, creating a numbing wave. The colors emitted within, and the lines drawn like a clear melody, give a sense of music. Approximately 20 pieces, mainly newly drawn works, will be exhibited. YUGEN Gallery will be relocated in April, and this exhibition will be the last exhibition at the current gallery.
A journey to find art that transcends time and space
When Masumi Iwakawa was a high school student, she was ``blown away'' by a live performance by Suetoshi Shimizu, a saxophonist based in Hiroshima, and decided to become a jazz musician. Although she entered a music college, she dropped out early because the environment was not conducive to learning jazz, and studied under Suetoshi Shimizu.
In the realm of music activities,Iwakawa's artwork on CD jackets for the band she belonged to became a topic of conversation.She began painting works that were displayed in restaurants and even murals on buildings in her hometown of Hiroshima. She says that she fell in love with painting because she felt the expression of combining colors and spinning and layering lines gave her a sense of freedom and stimulation that was different from music.
Wanting to compete in the world of painting, she moved to the United States alone in 2013. She began her career as a painter in New York, USA, using a room owned by Andy Warhol and also occupied by Jean-Michel Basquiat as her studio.
``At that time, when I saw Basquiat's paintings for the first time, I felt as if I had met him. It was like I was witnessing the moment when he lived.The works that he brought to life will move people thousands of years later, it feels like we might be able to communicate with each other. I was fascinated by the endless world of art that transcends time."
"Drawing is an adventure. You don't just go in one direction, you go forward and back, you look around and sway, finding things and losing things. I'm excited about that kind of adventure."
Since then, Iwakawa has traveled to Europe and Asia while based in the United States. Her travels are always deeply connected to her creations, as I gain inspiration from the experience of opening my heart to the people, climate, and animals of the places I visit.
In particular, in Berlin, Germany, where she has been based since 2017, she had the opportunity to interact with local people and hear directly about the "painful and sad history of violence," and Iwakawa, who is from Hiroshima, says she felt a lot of things. Also, as she witnessed the absurdity of a society where various races come and go, she changed from the clear, high-contrast color scheme she used when she lived in the United States to a deep color scheme around this time, depicting people she had not drawn much before. As a motif, she began to draw portraits with expressions that are difficult to read.
Something intangible that stirs emotions
After returning to Japan in 2019, her interest in line expression and creating color layers, which she had always been interested in, increased, and she focused on abstract expression. After a solo exhibition in 2022 with the title ``signifié,'' which means ``something that is meant, something that is represented.'' She says she values the feeling of being moved by something, scooping it up and placing it on the canvas. In the same year, she also gave birth. ``The mystery of life that felt during pregnancy, the beauty and strength of unfinished life'' became a new breath of fresh air for the painter Iwakawa.
This exhibition, ``BLOW,'' is being held at a time when there is a growing purity of expression in ``the way things are before they become words, without being bound by abstraction or concreteness.'' The breath that Iwakawa senses through her paintings emerges as a passion that shakes the viewer's sensibilities like the blow of a saxophone.
