Profile

Yoko Obata was born in 1971 in Osaka, Japan. She was educated in Japan. She was graduated from Kinki University in 1994 with BA Fine Art and she moved to England in 1996. She completed MA Fine Art course at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in 1999. She now lives and works in London. She has exhibited widely in the UK and Japan since 1995.

Obata predominantly works in oil on canvas and in commission basis, on MDF. Obata originally intended to learn Japanese Traditional Painting and practiced with traditional Japanese pigment, it still influence current practice.

‘My works themselves are primarily concerned with formal relationships: between colours, shapes and tones and more recently with the structural formations of the patterns I make. Previously my paintings were constructed from the centre out and on square canvases, recent works they have had multiple and scattered starting points. This development or new way of working has allowed me freedom to work more intuitively, helped increase the variety of design options I can develop and also make a quite rigid working process a more enjoyable one. The mathematical calculations I employ and the controlled nature of my process is probably a result of my original training in traditional Japanese painting and aesthetics.

My early ambitions were in establishing myself as an artist working in Japan in a traditional sense and it was through my degree that my interests grew geographically and culturally wider. I am aware of an element of conservatism within my work; in the processes I use, the act of patterns making and my positioning of shapes within compositions. Whilst working these things are in the unconscious as my thoughts are then in keeping things simple, natural and visually successful.’ (Statement, Yoko Obata, March 2007)