On the Ground / On the Table

Outline of the exhibition

MARUEIDO JAPAN is pleased to announce that it will hold a solo exhibition of painter Ozu Wataru called On the Ground / On the Table.

Ozu Wataru was born in Tokyo in 1991. After graduating from Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka High School, he completed his major in painting at the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the Tokyo University of the Arts (2017). Currently, he is active based at Kodai Collective Studio in Toride City, Ibaraki Prefecture. After graduating from graduate school, Ozu reflected on his work and developed an interest in the expressions of landscape painting of Oriental art, Ukiyo-e (color prints of everyday life in the Edo period), and Western-influenced painting (paintings of the Edo period before oil painting was introduced). He extracts images by studying past works painted with basic themes such as "still life paintings," "landscape paintings," and "portrait paintings,” and he is exploring the “relationship between painter and motif” and the “setting of painting space” in the spaces of Oriental paintings, while creating his own work.

The exhibition name, On the Ground / On the Table, has been selected from the titles of Asian and Western still life paintings.
Apple motif, which Ozu has been painting in these past few years, has been depicted by many Western artists not only as a tabletop still life painting, but also as a religious symbol.
He places this apple on the floor of his studio, moves his focus while walking around it, and conscious of the Oriental way of capturing things and the space of painting, he rethinks it before his canvas.
As for portraits, his work is a study of the motif from “Standing Figure,” a representative work of Matsumoto Shunsuke (1912-1948), who died at the age of 36 soon after World War Two, (painted in 1942, owned by The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama), and it considers the perspective of a painter who was painting at the age of 30, the same age as Ozu, although it was a different period. In addition, there is also a wide range of motifs, such as portraits without models that rely the use of paints, and landscape art that effectively uses on screens the expression of rain seen in ukiyo-e by Hiroshige (1797-1858), etc., and modern Japanese paintings.
Please take this opportunity to appreciate the work of a very talented artist.