Kouichi Tabata

Tabata produces paintings that incorporate kinetic elements, and video works which have been composed under painterly constraints. Notable works include “bee” (2006), a video work created from countless images of bees that the artist had drawn until the ink of his pen ran out, and the “one way or another” series comprised of drawings and oil paintings where a single motif is depicted across two separate support mediums and then “shifted” to meet their completion. Through such “shifts” between media and the very support medium, Tabata enable the various imagery contained within the subject before ones eyes to carefully emerge. Instead of converging a single thing and its surrounding traces into one, he presents a perspective that connect to their different means of presence and movement in the context of a time and space that could have simultaneously lapsed.

Tabata’s works are included in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo), Toyota Art Collection (Aichi), and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo).

Courtesy of Yutaka Kikutake Gallery