The ASU Art Museum is giving Brazilian-born artist Oscar Oiwa his first U.S. exhibition.
Friday marked the beginning of this exhibit titled, "Gardening with Oscar Oiwa."
Oiwa, who is of Japanese descent, is a big-market painter in South America, said curator Marilyn Zeitlin.
Zeitlin said she was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2004 to see art dealer Thomas Cohn about a different artist. Cohn showed her Oiwa's work, and she decided to have an exhibit at the museum. The museum also bought one of his paintings. "It is some of the best painting I've seen in a long time," she said.
"We like to give artists their first U.S. exhibitions," Zeitlin added.
The display's nine Oiwa paintings lend themselves to the theme of the garden. The paintings do not show the average flower garden, though.
"Oiwa is interested in big cities," Zeitlin said. "He's lived in big cities and over time, parts of the cities tend to become slums. His paintings are another vision of the urban environment."
The paintings are very technical, perhaps because Oiwa has a bachelor's degree in architecture and urbanism. They can be understood up close and from a distance.
They also have political metaphors - some more subtle than others.
"Coliseum," one of Oiwa's pieces, shows an abandoned coliseum as an alternative living space. Empty couches give evidence of habitation, but there are no people. The gates leading to the coliseum floor are titled "West Gate," "East Gate" and "Middle East Gate." The floor is a map of the world.
In "Do You Like Iraq? (Barbeque)," Mickey Mouse is offering Iraq - which looks like a cut of steak - on a fork to Betty Boop. Other American icons are also participants in the barbeque that takes place behind what look like tenements.
The center of the exhibition is "Pooch." From far away, the 90-by-264 inch painting shows an ominous black dog next to a tree in a flower garden. Closer up, however, the flowers look like explosions of some sort and the garden has tuned into large city buildings. In the foreground, it appears that something is being rebuilt.
These paintings are all open to interpretation, however. Zeitlin said some people thought the flowers looked more like cinnamon rolls and people had very different feelings about the dog. "Some people think it is fearful; others pity it."
The black dog is the only living animal in any of the paintings. Couches, houses and vehicles show evidence of the existence of human beings, but none are depicted.
"Part of Oiwa's genius is his use of technical metaphors that are not too narrow in their meaning," Zeitlin said. This allows for viewers to be able to understand the painting and also interpret it in their own ways.
"Gardening with Oscar Oiwa" will run at the ASU Art Museum until Feb. 11, 2007.
Reach the reporter at Jennifer.Oconnor.1@asu.edu.
