b. 1958, Nagoya, Japan. Lives and works in Nagoya, Japan.

Mitsuko Miwa is an artist based in Aichi Prefecture whose painterly practice has evolved through diverse stylistic transitions since her early years. Her work materialises across drawings, paintings, and a variety of objects, wary of given categories or styles.

At the centre of her practice is the act of looking itself: her work can be understood as a phenomenological set-up of perception, pointing to the tension between materiality and meaning and the precariousness of any form of semantic construction. Diverse motifs, figures, furniture, landscapes, suggest that her interest lies not in the painted objects but in painting itself as a device.

Miwa held a scholarship from the Philip Morris Foundation, residing in Berlin from 1996 to 1997, and was subsequently selected as a guest artist for the Swedish artistic exchange program IASPIS, Stockholm, in 1998. Her works have been included in international exhibitions, among them “Vanishing Point — Contemporary Art from Japan,” which toured New Delhi and Mumbai in 2007, and the prominent international art festival Aichi Triennale 2022.

Download Bio