Painting # 214 – by Akira Iha – mixed media on panel – 48 x 48 x 1.75 inches – year 2014 – at Paia Contemporary Gallery

NEW ABSTRACT ART by Paia Contemporary Gallery by Akira Iha

About the Artist

This new painting by Akira Iha just arrived to the gallery this week. On this latest piece the artist is combining his earlier with his later style. His meticulous abstract art and great amount of detail on each piece, makes him a very slow artist and only allowing for a few pieces yearly. His abstract art has been featured at a number of national galleries. Akira Iha has also shown at The Contemporary Museum of Honolulu, Honolulu Academy of Arts, the First Hawaiian Center , the Schaefer International Gallery at the Maui Arts and Cultural center and the Japanese Art Center of New York. Akira Iha’s abstract artwork resides in a number of private collections around the world both in international and public collections such as the Hawaii State Foundation of the Arts.

Artist Statement
Over the last several years I traveled throughout Japan visiting numerous Zen temples, the tea houses and famous historical ruins. My paintings describe the elegant beauty of simplicity and tranquility I found in these places, inspired by the formal exterior and interior structures of the Japanese tea house as well as the meditative properties of the tea house ceremony. Nijiriguchi, the title of several of my abstract paintings, directly translates to mean the threshold or opening of the tea house. As an abstract artist, my mixed media paintings are built by multiple layers of paint on sheets of paper on wood panel. Then, using a reductive process, pigments are removed by incising lines and sanding the paint to expose parts of the under layers of color. This technique creates a geometric structure with a subtle sense of space. This minimalist paintings lets the viewer’s eye be drawn into the composition as if entering a structure. Light seems to emanate from within through the exposed areas of submerged color.