2015 Catalogue Archive

Most well-known for the round-headed figures that fill many of her works, Tokyo-born Nobuko Watabiki presses oil pastel into Japanese paper to form soft shapes that blend her often contrasting colors. One of Watabiki’s more abstract drawings, Untitled 2008-62 keeps the focus on her deliberate act of mark-making and the accumulation of pastel caused by her technique. Rows of idiosyncratic rectangles cross the paper, leaving a slightly gridded negative space. Watabiki has lived and worked in Berlin since 2008, and her work appears in solo and group exhibition in Europe and Japan.