ART-PRESENTATION: Masako Ando-Portraits
Masako Ando paints children, animals and plants on porcelain-smooth canvas surfaces. Her works are characterized by delicate lines, multi-layered colors and a depth that seems to draw the viewer in. Like the internationally acclaimed artists Yoshitomo Nara and Hiroshi Sugito, Masako Ando studied under Nobuya Hitsuda. It was during this time that she began making paintings without regard for the prevailing trends and fast pace of production, with her own sensibilities as her sole guide.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Tomio Koyama Gallery
Masako Ando’s solo exhibition “Portraits” features ceramic relief works that have developed a new frontier within her practice, along with a selection of charcoal, pencil, and water color drawings that will be shown for the first time. Working with motifs such as young children, woolen knitted items, animals, plants and flowers, Ando creates paintings with eloquently smooth surfaces that take advantage of the characteristics of oil paint, and are conceived through various pictorial elements such as detailed depiction and her composition of the picture plane that incorporates the presence of large blank spaces. In contrast, while engaging with the same subject matter, her pencil drawings distinct for their meticulously elaborate execution, illustrate a much harder and solid texture. The poetic world of Ando’s work, in which the events of daily life were linked to broken memories and fragments of text, had received significant attention and acclaim. The works presented in “Portraits” are the result of Ando’s search for new expressions that began from these considerations. In addition to the changes in her life such as moving to Seto city and giving birth to her second child, one of the things that had significantly motivated her to explore new means of expression was her new perspective on modern Japanese painting that she had acquired through participating in the 2017 group exhibition, “The Evolution of Realism” (Hiratsuka Museum of Art, thereafter traveling to four locations). As she continued to produce work, Ando realized that what she in fact observes are the facial expressions of the person, the pattern of the clothes they are wearing, as well as the situation in which they are in and the signs of their presence. What thus became one of the major themes for Ando’s work is how to realize both the sensation that largely contributes to creating that atmosphere and the details of the situation. In the midst of these circumstances, the first thing that came to her mind was to draw with charcoal on charcoal paper. In this way, the overall atmosphere and the facial expressions of her subjects appear to be depicted in a much softer manner than in her previous pencil drawings, and it appears as if the very presence and aura of these people drift forth from within the image. Living in Seto city, Ando found herself in an environment where ceramics were a familiar presence. Furthermore, she states that at the time she was driven by the intuition that working with ceramics would enable her to realize “the feeling that she was looking for”. Ando first devises the shapes within her work to their utmost detail through clay, and then controls the overall image through the colors and textures of the glaze. In this way the overall task and detailed tasks are not mixed, while also enabling her to incorporate the strengths and advantages of the materials. With this presentiment proving to be right, she engaged in research and studies over a period of half year as an artist-in-residence at the Seto Ceramics and Glass Art Center, and started producing works using ceramics. For Ando, who until now produced paintings and drawings that by nature of the medium were all unique, ceramics as a material had also brought about a significant by-product of being able to use a single prototype to produce completely different works that altered the “alignment of the gaze and focal point of the image” in numerous ways depending on the clay and glaze used, or ways of firing. The works, “Girl in Knitted Sweater II” “III” and “IV” presented in this exhibition, are all made from the same prototype. Ando uses her own hands and a spatula to precisely sculpt and give form to the motifs underlying her works, from the knitted stitches of the sweater to the straight gaze of the young girl that implies a strong sense of will, and the artist’s gaze and fluctuating emotions in response to them. At the same time, major characteristics include qualities that are unique to ceramics such as the power of the material, glaze, the aspect of fortuity brought about through firing, as well as the variation of each work. On the other hand, the series of watercolor drawings serve to instantaneously capture moments from her daily life. Rather than depicting images from within her mind like she had done so before, she selects scenes from the countless accumulation of photographs taken on a daily basis, and reconstructs them in the form of drawings.
Photo: Masako Ando, Pineapple II, 2020, Ceramic, 80.0 x 90.0 cm, ©︎ Masako Ando, Courtesy the artist and Tomio Koyama Gallery
Info: Tomio Koyama Gallery, complex665 2F, 6-5-24, Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 3/4-8/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://tomiokoyamagallery.com