WOAW Gallery is pleased to present URLANDSCHAFT, the Asia solo debut of multidisciplinary artist En Iwamura. Citing the current state of confusion and chaos in the world from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate disasters and catastrophic wars, the Kyoto-based Japanese artist aims to invoke a sense of lively and wondrous innocence with his paintings, sculptures, and installations that take the viewer to a new, metaphysical realm as the ultimate prompt for contemplation.
Entitled Neo Jomon: Beans, Iwamura’s ceramic sculpture series presents “simple round forms” of dynamic beings with childlike expressions that seem almost cartoonish. Portraying themselves in pastel ombres, the odd and fanciful shapes are cast to inspire a strange-yet-familiar feeling of peace that resonate deeply and thematically with the artist’s abstract ink-on-paper paintings of neutral faces and geometrically fascinating patterns. Similarly, the newly developed installation of plants is created as an indoor garden in the gallery space to bring forth an ambiguous vision of tranquility that only exists in the viewer’s mind, and with it, the artist continues the exploration of Ma in his practice - the Japanese concept of space and movement.
As alluded by the exhibition title, the work on show depict “the original scenery from the bottom of the human heart, which are often accompanied by feelings of nostalgia but may also be a mental landscape rather than a real landscape,” says En Iwamura.
About En Iwamura
En Iwamura was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1988, where he continues to live and work today.
He earned his BFA and first MFA from the Kanazawa College of Art and Craft in Kanazawa, Japan in 2011 and 2013, respectively, and earned a second MFA from Clemson University in 2016. Iwamura has completed residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana (2016-2018), and the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in China (2018), among others. Most notably he has been exhibited in the American Museum of Ceramic Art, in Pomona, CA (2019) as well as being the subject of solo presentations at Ross + Kramer Gallery in East Hampton and at UNTITLED, Art Fair in Miami in 2018, 2019 and 2022.