Mamiko Otsubo
(*1974 in Nishinomiya City, Japan, lives and works in Los Angeles) is a radical conceptual artist. Brought up in San Diego where she did her BA in Economics in 2002, she continued studying on the West Coast in Pasadena at the Art Center College of Design (BA in 2002) before moving to the East Coast for an MFA in Sculpture at the famous Yale University, in New Haven. Later she lived in New York and moved 2015 to Los Angeles. Her stunning work always offers many cross-references and associations. She is completely knowledgeable in art history especially of the Minimalist and late Minimalist movements of the 1960s and 70s. In her solo exhibition Sky Lobby with the gallery in 2013 she referred with a grid of polished brass poles with patina burger puns to late Minimalist works such as Carl Andre’s Eight Cuts and Walter De Maria’s The Broken Kilometer, which deal with the problem of part by part composition by addressing the entire floor plan of the exhibition space as if it were itself a frame. Simultaneously compact and expansive, Mamiko Otsubo works actively engage with the vernacular and alchemic power imbued in materials, as a way to ultimately reflect on the power of art objects in our lives. Whilst often minimal in her final presentation, Mamiko Otsubo’s work utilizes a variety of visual strategies from a wide cross section of industries, to augment the contemporary space of art for the viewer.