午夜剧场

After graduating from the Faculty of Pharmacy and the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, I joined a department store. After working in areas such as women's clothing buying, I left the company and opened my own gallery (Tanabe Gallery). I continue to be active as an artist today.

I have loved drawing since I was a child. I started oil painting when I joined the art club in junior high school, and after entering university, I continued my creative activities with the comprehensive art group Palette Club.

In my daily life, I often paint themes that are familiar and commonplace but feel slightly off or comical. Recently, I have been painting meat with beautiful marbling being picked up by chopsticks. This was triggered by my interest in the meat held by chopsticks in grocery flyers, which has a commanding presence. I think it is a standard advertising image meant to present high-end, delicious-looking meat, but I couldn't help but notice it, and it seemed irresistibly comical to me. I believe there are many other things in daily life that we overlook because they seem too obvious at first glance, but are actually comical or feel out of place.

As my career indicates, I don't have a consistent theme or a strong message I want to convey in my creative activities. Rather than painting everything in an easy-to-understand way, I paint up to the point I want to paint and leave the rest to the viewer. Because of this, conversations with people who see my meat works can range from social issues to types of Wagyu beef, and I am happy to receive impressions and thoughts that I never would have imagined. I believe that leaving some blank space, rather than deciding everything completely, allows for that kind of unknown fun to expand. I also want to value the capacity to accept humor and the ambiguity that tends to be avoided in society.

I opened the gallery in April of this year. As I continued my creative activities, I began to want more people to enjoy art and expression and to lower the barrier to buying works. I established the space with the aim of expanding the base of the art market and creating a place for young artists to work. As both an artist and a gallerist, I want to continue creating things and places that contain humor and ambiguity.

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.