Imura art gallery, Kyoto proudly announces the launch of Tashima Etsuko's solo exhibition.

Tashima started her career in 1980's as a leading artist of a female artist group called Cho Shojo (Super Girls) which was characterized with its powerful expression that easily crosses the boundaries of conventional styles of art. Her feministic works was spotlighted especially for their representative form of female body and vivid colors. Around 1988 as organic twining forms emerged accompanied with botanical impression, vivid and lustrous color on surface started to submerge in her works. This alternation made the artist become more conscious of form as entity including the air surrounding a piece. This progress led her further to a series of white pieces covered solely with white slip. The symbolic form seems to represent the spirituality existing at the very bottom of mind showing a quiet and peaceful vision of the world.

Soon later Tashima reached to a whole new expression of combining translucent glass composed by a technique called Mold Cast. It involves a process of filling small glass pieces into plaster molds and baking them in a kiln. The glass harmonizes with ceramics figured with cupola furnace and color slip, and the sophisticated form is fully charged with supple and female impetus.

Yellow flowers suffuse an exhibition "Flowers", Tashima's first solo exhibition in 5 years. The lemon-yellow with pollen softness and gloss of glaze is full of life force. The artist employs recycled glass of fluorescent light as new material for glass parts. Its color of pale green looks as if it holds subtle light within to your eyes, and fuses into the vivid yellow. Etsuko Tashima's new creation with fountain-like clarity, as she intended, "by vital colors induces [us] into pleasant world of brightness."