Untitled 91-24

Toeko Tatsuho was an artist representing Japanese contemporary paintings. Born in Nagano Prefecture in 1950, she finished the graduate school of Tokyo University of the Arts in 1974. In the 1970s, in response to Pop art and minimal art trends, Tatsuno produced controlled, inorganic prints and paintings with stripes and grids. From the 1980s, she focused on producing oil paintings and pursued abstract expressions through organic forms having decorative patterns and volumes. Although Tatsuno’s paintings are abstract, viewers feel as if the paintings were natural, three-dimensional space. Until her last years, Tatsuno kept on drawing colorful abstract paintings with rhythmically placed distorted orbits and rectangles.

Circles of different sizes are drawn on the large canvas of Untitled 91-24. All the circles are flat, with some outlined and some not. The foreground with outlined circles, the middle ground with circles having no outline, and the purple-based background with brush touches like Monet compose the pictorial space with shallow depth. The circles on the canvas look as if they had magnetic force. They show slow movements as if to exert attractive and repulsive forces on each other.