Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present its first exhibition with Japanese artist Mitsuko Miwa. The exhibition Leap Second, spread over two floors of the gallery, offers an insight into the breadth of the output of the artist, showing works from the 1980s until the present day.
The title of this exhibition is drawn from the one-second adjustment to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), often applied to it in order to accommodate the difference between a 'precise time', measured by atomic clocks, and the 'imprecise', observed solar time that varies due to irregularities and the long-term slowdown in the rotation of the Earth. Miwa claims the space of a 'leap second' within the chronology of the multiple histories of art. She reminds us with grace, wit, lightness, and tactility of the structural irregularities and slowdowns these histories undergo.
The work of Mitsuko Miwa materialises in drawings, paintings and objects, but also anything else that comes to her mind—an infinitely varied output. Wary of given categories or styles, her understanding of identity is something fluid, transient and ephemeral. Her practice can be understood as a phenomenological set-up of perception: the act of looking seems to be at the centre of the work of the artist, pointing to the tension in language between materiality and meaning and the precariousness of any form of semantic construction.
Mitsuko Miwaʼs works also seem to be trying to maintain a certain distance by slipping past the viewer's apprehension and refusing to be fully understood. In this way, the artist may be trying to turn our attention to the act of 'seeing' itself.
Over the past 30 years, Galerie Greta Meert established itself as one of Brussels’ leading contemporary art galleries. Founded in 1988 as Galerie Meert Rihoux, it was subsequently renamed after its founding director Greta Meert in 2006. Located in the center of Brussels, the gallery occupies a five-story Art Nouveau building designed by Louis Bral and renovated for the gallery by renowned Belgian architects Hilde Daem and Paul Robbrecht. Since 2012 three floors of the building are dedicated to exhibitions, making it possible to maintain an expanded exhibition schedule.
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