Two elements I love most about paintings are experimenting with color and developing the faces of my subjects. While I don’t have a theme when I paint, I am always thinking about my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, and our ancestors’ beauty, strength, struggles, love.
Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, in an interview in Galerie, October 2, 2020
Asuka Anastacia Ogawa creates large-scale figurative paintings filled with androgynous, dark-skinned characters that often appear to be participating in rituals or performances.
The artist draws on her peripatetic upbringing, as well as her Afro-Brazilian and Japanese heritage, to inform these enigmatic narratives.
Born in Tokyo, Ogawa moved with her family to Petróplis, Brazil, at the age of three. She attended high school in Sweden and earned a BFA at Central St. Martins, University of the Arts, London.
Ogawa’s work was first brought to the attention of the art world through the artist Henry Taylor, who gave her a show in his Los Angeles Studio in 2017. Two years later, Half Gallery presented her debut solo exhibition in New York, and not long after, she joined the roster at Blum & Poe, presenting her first show, Feijão, at the gallery’s Tokyo location in 2020.