Natsuko SAKAMOTO: Tiles | Signals — unexpected dimensions
Past exhibition
This will be Sakamoto's first solo exhibition in four years, and will feature about 100 new works, ranging from large oil paintings to smaller works, as well as drawings and sculptures.
"17 years of arranging oil painted tiles on canvas have passed before I knew it, yet painting for me remains an unnatural and inconvenient act. My comfort and the freedom of a painting have nothing to do with each other. Yet only the act of painting allows me to think about this unretraceable reality. To live, therefore, is also to paint in search of freedom. For me to do so, I continuously require new methodologies.
In your (future) land, is painting still a way of getting in touch with a world that doesn’t yet exist? Lately I’ve been thinking about what a dimension of a painting capable of attracting many shadows of you could possibly be. You unpredictably change from moment to moment—but if cause and effect exist between the past and present, any number of your shadows must be encapsulated in our time. I believe that extracting them as some color and form will prove a clue to measuring the ungraspable position of the “now.”
And I want to transmit, somewhere, these signals who appear as shadows of the future."
May 2023
Sakamoto Natsuko
A booklet produced for this exhibition will also be on sale at the gallery from July 1st. It includes an email correspondence with Mr. Atsushi Shinfuji, and is a must-read for understanding the deepening of Sakamoto's methodology in painting.
Sakamoto paints in sections, without making preliminary sketches on the canvas. She believes that “every move is a turning point” in the painting process. In principle, she does not go back to a previous section, but completes the work piece by piece. Under this rule, distortion naturally occurs in the painting space as the plastic elements proliferate on the canvas. Sakamoto's most famous work is a distorted space covered with tiles, a characteristic element of her early paintings, in which women who look like her alter egos are portrayed. In recent years, Sakamoto has been deepening her approach to painting in a more theoretical manner, with particular attention to the figurative experiments on form production by various artists in the past.
Sakamoto graduated from Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts with a MFA and a DFA in Oil Painting.
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