Rieko Hotta works in a serial practice of paintings and objects that evoke tactile images based on the concept of embodied abstraction. Using a clearly limited choice of color and material, the abstract thinking is drawn to a physicality. In a black-and-white sphere, the works are soft, precise like systems and matter that interact. In a careful, sober tactility. In a quiet, almost meditative aesthetic.
In Hotta’s new paintings, the interest goes towards combining different proportions. The repetitive figures and shapes are arranged, along with the imperfect, mysterious, broken or unbalanced. It may be her touch and brushstrokes; a human presence that can also lead one to think of the interference of a phantom. In this subdued color scale, Hotta works with over-drawn abstract images, figure and form as a system, where the movements of the more free, random hand, is combined with the regulated repetitive system within the picture plane. The paintings are composed by arranging dots and abstract shapes in a balanced concept, where it is important to follow an intuition, in order to precisely ignore and break the concept.
Within this process, in the same subdued tone of hers, Hotta seeks to express a more personal abstract language than we have seen from her before. Hotta revolves around how and what we can scan and touch in our time. How do the real and the non-real coexist? And what remains within this reality, after your own individual filtering process.
Rieko Hotta is born 1977 in Tokyo. Since 2012 she has been living and working in Berlin. In 2001 she graduated from Nihon University College of Art, Department of Fine Arts in Tokyo.