Nobuko WATANABE

Nobuko WATANABE (b. 1948) crossed over art and music based on painting and piano that she learned in childhood, to develop the relational thinking of existence with themes of color, form, and space. Since 1980s, the artist developed current working style of forming a boundary and an expanded space within the boundary through covering a wooden frame with a variety of vivid colors of fabric. Such as an abstract painting, the lines formed of sharply stretched fabric covering the wooden frame create a feeling of fluidity and tension at the same time. Nobuko's works are in the form of shaped canvases that deviate from the basic form of a rectangle, and own the form of oblique lines and curves out of horizontal and vertical. Due to this way, her work specified neither painting nor sculpture.

WATANABE's works complete entirely when it is installed in the space. When the works are positioned in the gallery space, a close but free resonance is formed between the works, and the entire space becomes an installation work directed by the artist. The space formed in the wooden frame expands into the space where it is installed, then creating a flow between the spaces. Her work is closely related to the structure of the entire space, and the stainless steel work in the form of rolled paper with various colors on both sides, which started in 2014, expanded the space to the next level.

Nobuko WATANABE awarded the grand prize at the Yoshihara Jiro Art Competition in 1999. The artist held solo exhibitions at ARARIO Gallery I Seoul (Seoul, Korea) in 2017, Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (Aomori, Japan) in 2002, and Otani Memorial Art Museum (Hyogo, Japan) in 2001 and participated in various group exhibitions at Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art (Chiba, Japan) in 2020, Hyogo prefectural Museum of Art (Kobe, Japan), and Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (Fukuoka, Japan) in 2013. Nobuko's works are collected at Osaka Contemporary Art Centre (Japan), Aomori Contemporary Art Center (Japan), Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (Japan), Otani Memorial Art Museum (Japan), and currently working based in Dusseldorf, Germany and Osaka, Japan.