Natsuko Sakamoto is a Japanese contemporary artist based in Tokyo. Her semi-figurative paintings, mostly of women, possess mesmerisingly distorted spatial qualities that stem from a distinct compositional technique using cellular grids.
Read MoreThe Kumamoto-born artist graduated with a Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Aichi University of the Arts and Music in 2012. From her early figurative works such as Overflow (2008) and Nagisa (2012), women have been the core subject of her paintings. These women are presented in distinct, vibrant swirling spaces.
Since 2012, Natsuko Sakamoto's focus has shifted from narrative to exclusively formal interests, highlighting the act of painting itself and the unique spatial qualities inherent to painting. This has translated to a distinct approach to composition—already in development in her early works—whereby the artist applies paint, stroke by stroke, from one end of the canvas to the other, creating sections of cell-like patterns.
Linking these completed shapes on the canvas together without any re-working, Natsuko Sakamoto creates distorted, labyrinthine spaces. Occupying these spaces are female figures who often resemble the artist herself. These figures further pull the viewer into the painting, whether gallivanting together on horseback, as in Slow motion (2016), or standing alone, these women are embedded in this strange theatre of formal expression.
In the more recent 'Signals' triptych (2019), Natsuko Sakamoto has moved further away from the figurative while still engaging in spatial concerns. On a two-dimensional canvas, she presents a seemingly four-dimensional constellation of co-ordinate axes, lines, and surrounding grid meshes, each with its own texture, colour-set, and rhythm. These stem from painted points that were chosen arbitrarily by scattering particles on the artist's dining room table.
A study of interconnectedness through the micro and macro, these images could be tracing signals across time and space or mapping the interlacing cells and micro-organisms that aggregate to form the human body. Through such pigment work, at the core of her practice, Sakamoto explores notions of space and connectedness.
Natsuko Sakamoto has exhibited widely around Japan in group and solo shows. Since 2014 she has been exhibiting with Parplume: a collective of young Japanese artists. Her work can also be found in several prominent Japanese collections, including Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art; Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki; the Takahashi Collection; and The National Museum of Art, Osaka.
A Yardstick for Straying: Drawing Constellations Among the Stardust of Signals, ANOMALY, Tokyo (2019); Painter's Retinae, ARATANIURANO, Tokyo (2016); The World of Natsuko Sakamoto, ARATANIURANO, Tokyo (2014); ARKO 2013 Sakamoto Natsuko, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki (2013); Still Life, Kenji Taki Gallery, Tokyo (2012); overflow, Hakutosya, Aichi (2008).
The Riddle of Art: Takahashi Collection, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art (2017); The Best Selection of The Ohara Museum of Art, The National Art Center, Tokyo (2016); Parplume University II, Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto (2014); DER STURM, Nagoya Citizen Gallery Yada, Aichi (2013); ART as MAGIC: Visionary artists there inner supernatural world, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (2012); Garden of Painting: Japanese Art of the 00s, The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2010).
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
