MISAKO & ROSEN in pleased to announce artist Maya Hewitt’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Hewitt, presently based in London, has participated in numerous exhibitions internationally including, most recently Passion Fruits, Thomas Olbricht collection, Berlin (2010) and Elusive Dreams which traveled from La Cathedrale, Paris to the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art (2009). Within Japan , Hewitt studied at the Nagoya University of Art and was a participant in residencies under th auspices of both Tokyo Wonder Site and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. In 2010, Hewitt collaborated with noted Tokyo-based jewelry designer Yoshiyo Abbe (Petite Robe Noire) on the exhibition Stones in Paws.

The present exhibition marks a shift in Hewitt’s practice away from the immersive environment of a floor-to-ceiling installation in favor of discrete works on canvas. This development places Hewitt at the forefront of a younger generation of artists exploring a return to painted figuration. Yet, though figurative, representational and expressive, even – the paintings depict an anxiety apparently borne from the artist’s particular living environment and sub-cultural interests – Hewitt’s most recent work actually embraces a form of abstraction: the decorative. Eschewing the perspectival depth that characterized her first, recent return to discrete painting, as well as the sculptural weight of wooden panel in favor of painting on canvas, Hewitt has created a body of work whose formal flatness stands in direct contrast to the uneasy representational content depicted within each painting. Somehow, Hewitt has managed to create a contradictory series of abstract mis-en-scene complicating the notion of depiction; Hewitt’s decor representing a novel position within contemporary painterly practice.