The Shiseido Gallery is pleased to announce that from August 23rd (Tue) to October 16th (Sun), 2011 it will host a solo exhibition of the work of Toeko Tatsuno, one of Japan's representative women artists.

In this spring, Tatsuno stayed at the printing studio in Paris and worked on the stone lithography for the first time. This exhibition will show the new works of stone lithography which were made during her stay in Paris, and the new oil paintings which were made after she returned from Paris.

Born in 1950, Toeko Tatsuno studied at Graduate School of Tokyo University of Fine Arts & Music. In 1995, she became the first woman ― and also the youngest artist ― to have a solo show at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art. Since then she has been a driving force in contemporary modernist painting in Japan, and even today continues to explore new vistas of artistic expression. Tatsuno also participated in the Fifth Tsubakikai*1 artists' exhibition circle, which began its five-year run in 2001.

Tatsuno has consistently pursued the abstract in oil paintings that rich in their depth of field and sense of spatial fluctuation, abundant in color and composed with both geometrical and organic forms, but in fact she began her work as an artist with the techniques of silk-screening, and ever since has continued moving between the worlds of both print and oil painting.

This exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery will feature some of the work Tatsuno pursued at the IDEM*2 studio in Paris, where she spent a month in February and March exploring the now-rare use of real linestone as a lithographic printing medium.*3

While Tatsuno has long worked with diverse printing techniques including silkscreen, woodblock, etching, and aluminum lithograph, this was the first time for even this experienced artist to explore the original stone lithography. Additionally, it was also her first experience in the Paris studio system, and through a process of trial and error she has been able to produce powerful works that are not only abstract but also give a premonition about new possibilities for printing.

This exhibition will show perhaps ten new lithographs, along with several new large-scale works in oil, including one size 500 painting. Tatsuno's world must have change during her month among those print workman in Paris, working in the medium that is the original basis for her own creative activities while at the same time exploring a new (for her) lithographic technique. Certainly we can look forward to seeing some fresh new perspectives in abstract expression from this masterful artist.

*1  The Tsubakikai is a post-war group exhibition of artists that started in 1947. With a membership that has changed with each incarnation over the past sixty years, it has become one of the Shiseido Gallery's flagship exhibition activities.
*2  Paris' famed IDEM, founded in the tradition of the Mourlot Studios where notable 20th century artists including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse once worked, is a printing studio where artists can explore creative activities in the now-rare techniques of actual stone lithography.
*3  Lithography, originating in the end of the18th century and named for the Greek word for stone, litho, is a printing technique that utilizes stone surfaces as the printing block. In modern times, other materials like zinc and aluminum have displaced stone for reasons of convenience, and because of the high level of technique and the equipment required, real stone lithography has become extremely rare, not only in Japan but in France as well.