Toeko Tatsuno

Place: Okaya City

Born: 1950

Death: 2014

Biography:

Toeko Tatsuno was a Japanese abstract painter, printmaker, and former professor at Tama Art University in Japan. Born on January 13, 1950, in Okaya City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, she began painting at a young age and was greatly influenced by leading contemporary artists of her time, such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Tatsuno's artistic style was characterized by the incorporation of existing images and photographs into her work, which was born from a situation where "the act of painting on canvas with a brush was considered completely old-fashioned".

Early Life and Education

Tatsuno studied at Suwa Futaba High School in Nagano Prefecture and entered the Department of Painting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1963. During her undergraduate years, she formed an artistic group, Cosmos Factory, with two of her classmates. The group's activities included silk-screening with photomechanical printing presses, which established Tatsuno's style of incorporating existing images and photographs into her work.

Artistic Style and Career

Tatsuno's artistic style evolved over the years, from printmaking to painting. Her early career was marked by experimentation with prints and drawings, using the figuration of differences created by the strength and slight blurring of line drawings inspired by the repetition of grid and stripe lines from tile walls. She was inspired by the expression of dots in Roy Lichtenstein's works and used them to combine the incidental nature of work by prints and the artificiality made by the artist's unique hand movement. In the 1980s, Tatsuno began to create continuous patterns of arabesques, diamonds, squares, spheres, and a wide variety of botanical and geometric motifs, working in painting and opening the possibility of contemporary 'painting' by relying on incomplete and concrete forms. After the 1990s, she continued to boldly depict a series of elementary forms, including spheres, rectangles, and corrugated shapes in the space of large paintings supported by gorgeous colors and heavy textures. Some of her notable works can be found at Toeko Tatsuno: Work 90-P-8, which is part of the Sezon Museum of Modern Art's collection in Karuizawa, Japan.

Awards and Recognition

Tatsuno's work was recognized with several awards, including the Mainichi Art Award in 1996. She was also the youngest artist to hold a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1995.

• Toeko Tatsuno's biography on Wikioo.org provides more information about her life and work.
• Her artistic style and career can be explored further through her Wikipedia page.

Tatsuno passed away on September 19, 2014, but her legacy lives on through her innovative and bold artistic style, which continues to inspire artists and art lovers around the world.