Mitsuo Miura
Imagined Memories
March 14–September 2, 2013
Place: Palacio de Cristal, Parque del Retiro (Madrid)
Organisation: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid)
Museo Reina Sofia
Calle de Santa Isabel, 52
28012 Madrid, Spain
The art of Mitsuo Miura (b. 1946, Iwate), who has lived in Spain since 1966, stands out for its near-geometrical shapes and well-defined colours that vary according to the themes explored. His work uses a wide range of methods, techniques and disciplines and has an affinity with certain languages of the movements that arose in the second half of the 20th century, such as minimalism. His works tend to establish a dialogue between the materials used and the space that hosts them, while making almost imperceptible references to elements of nature, elements that are highly stylised and reduced to their minimum expression.
In Imagined Memories, his intervention in the Palacio de Cristal, he delves into two of the aesthetic themes that give expression to his artistic vocabulary: geometric shapes and colours. For this building, one of Museo Reina Sofía’s two secondary sites in Parque del Retiro, his proposal begins on the pictorial level and extends to the spatial level, through circles of colours distributed on the floor and suspended from the ceiling. In this work Miura also includes strips of colour placed intermittently on the building’s skirting boards. His methods are built like a memory that reactivates a space from the realm of possibility, an imaginary area of uncertain existence that can only be completed mentally. Even the use of faded colours suggests the representation of diffuse situations.
The transparency of the exhibition space and the influence of daylight means that colours are perceived slightly differently depending on the time of day and the weather conditions. This visual play does not intend to be monumental or explicit but rather insinuated and intimate.
The column is key in the search for the essential and in the reduction of formal elements to their minimum expressions. It serves as an age-old architectural nexus the genesis of which is related to the schematics of trees. This narrative is complemented by the trees found in the park itself, which provides a natural backdrop to the plastic, abstract and stylised landscape created by this Japanese artist. The out-of-doors context becomes a substantial part of the meaning acquired by this work made especially for Palacio de Cristal.
