Natsuko Tanihara
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Natsuko Tanihara | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1989 (age 36–37) Saitama Prefecture, Japan |
| Alma mater | Kyoto City University of Arts |
Natsuko Tanihara (谷原菜摘子)(born 1989) was born in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. She completed her BFA and graduate studies in oil painting at the Kyoto City University of Arts. From 2017 to 2018, she received a grant from the former Gotoh Memorial Foundation and stayed in Paris, France. After returning to Japan, she went back to school for her PhD in Fine Arts. She is the recipient of numerous domestic awards and continues her production based in the Kansai region. She works in various mediums but is known for her signature works using velvet as a support and her use of decorative materials such as glitter, sequin and rhinestones.[1]
Tanihara has garnered various awards and accolades throughout the years. The following is not exhaustive.
In 2015, as a student at the Kyoto City University of Arts, she won the Koji Kinutani Award, the prize was established to promote figurative painters under the age of 35 by Mainichi Shimbun to support young painters.[2] She participated in the VOCA, Vision of Contemporary Art Exhibition in 2016. The show is held every year at the Ueno Royal Museum where young artists under the age of 40 are picked up by museum curators. She won the Shoreisho, the second place prize.[3] She received the Gotoh Memorial Cultural Award's Newcomer's Prize of Art in 2017 and spent one year in Paris on a grant from the Former Gotoh Memorial Culture Foundation.[4] In 2017, she received the Best Young Artist Award given by the City of Kyoto.[5] In 2020, Tanihara has participated in the ARKO Artists in Residence in Kurashiki, Ohara. This Ohara Museum of Art program supports young artists by offering them the use of the studio of Torajiro Kojima, a Yōga style painter. The museum is the first private museum focused on western art in Japan and was established in 1930 by Magosaburo Ohara. She was introduced in the Japanese television program Break Zenya in October, 2020. The BS Fuji television program introduces young artists. In 2021, the City of Osaka presented Tanihara with the Sakuya Konohana Award. The award is given to promising young artists who have contributed to the development of the culture of Osaka City.[6]
Artistic Style
Tanihara has experimented with various materials throughout her life. As an elementary school student, she would often grind glass, eggshells or seashells that she found and would collage them into her pastel drawings. In an interview with Sankei Shimbun, Tanihara relates a story about how she began to use velvet as a support instead of canvas. She had entered university to study Nihonga style painting because she loved the work of Iwasa Matabei but left the department after half a year and switched to the Yōga, western style painting, department. After switching departments, she says that she didn't like traditional white canvas because she felt her brush "wouldn't move" the way she wanted. After hearing that the American Abstract Expressionist Julian Schnabel painted on velvet, she experimented with the material and has continued using it ever since.[7]
In interviews with other various publications, she has said that her expression focuses on the dark legacy of humanity but presented through the aesthetic prism of decorative beautification. She often mixes mica, glitter, rhinestones and sequin into her paints and collages other decorative materials into her works. After her year-long grant-supported travels in Europe, she has experimented with works on paper using pastels. While she had used pastels on paper for studies for her larger velvet works, she began to work in earnest on her drawings on paper because she did not have a studio space during her time in Europe.[8]
In an interview conducted upon receiving the Sakuya Konohana Award from the City of Osaka, she explains that her works spring from narratives of her own creation. She postulates that narrative creation has been central to artistic creation and cites the example of scroll works from the late Heian period such as Stories of Hungry Ghosts. She argues that the narrative behind these works were most likely imagined by people to help them rationalize the unfair phenomenon that beset them.[9]