Mamiko Otsubo

Born in 1974 in Nishinomiya City, Japan, Mamiko Otsubo lives and works in Brooklyn, USA. Mamiko Otsubo’s objects and drawings deal with the subject of landscape: Sun, clouds, water and mountains are the kind of leitmotifs that appear in her work, fractured into abstraction.

Her polished surfaces with their carefully coordinated color and material combinations aim at a direct and sublime perception of traditional pictorial themes. Otsubo, who was born in Japan and now lives in New York, combines the visual elements of the different cultures that have influenced her with playful perfection and a touch of humor. She radically reduces the shapes she has borrowed from nature and interweaves them with elements taken from architecture and design. In this, she has particular recourse to the formal vocabulary of 20th-century modernist furniture design which, in turn, takes its inspiration from the fine arts.

The family of work produced by Otsubo for Art & Entrepreneurship demonstrates the whole breadth of her artistic oeuvre. For example, her star-shaped sculpture Stars references the 1960s design classic called "The Butterfly Chair", as well as a romantic idea of nocturnal bliss. In her work "Milky Way" she leads viewers astray, tongue in cheek, as they see themselves confronted with a misappropriated bench. Rather than applying the set of entrepreneurial values to her work as a subject matter, Mamiko Otsubo states that "it was more appropriate for me to think of them [the values] as essential elements in a tool kit for me as an artist."

Mamiko Otsubo’s work is located in an area of conflict in terms of cultural theory, comprising
as it does nature, design and art, and continues the modernist debate. Otsubo came to public attention in New York in 2005 through a project in the public sphere for the famous Public Art Funds and her participation in exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in 2007 in Long Island City.

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