Etsuko NAKATSUJI

　Nakatsuji was born in 1937 in Osaka. On graduating from senior high school, she started working for Hanshin Department Store in which she was assigned to the public relations department to be in charge of graphic design. Alongside her job, she also joined a group of fine artists where she worked mainly on life drawing and oil paintings. She left her job in 1962, the year she exhibited in “The 5th Contemporary Art Exhibition” and began her career as a full time artist.
In the following year she held a solo show at Tokyo Gallery in which she exhibited human shaped objects called “Poko Pin,” cute yet strange looking figures in various forms. Since then she been creating up until today works that feature “The shape of humans” in a variety of mediums including paintings, illustration books and objects. These were originally inspired by the objects she had made for your son. These human shapes were composed of various elements. Without a neck to separate the head and body, they have a lean torso with matching thin long legs. Neither with noses nor ears, their eyes are sometimes just dots or glaring at other times, with eccentric hair styles. Adorable but weird, they have a strong presence.
　From the mid-70s, she developed two-dimensional works featuring human shapes composed only of contours of the face or eyes and in her recent paintings, eyeless human shapes have become evident. The shapes, furthermore refined, with organic curves and straight lines accompanied with a minimal color palette, draws in the viewers and even hints out the nature of “humans” or our “bodies” as a functional container. At the same time encountering such notion, viewers are to realize the limitless minds we human beings behold, which is too vast to be contained totally.