Motoko Otsuki

Artist Statement: Motoko Otsuki is a painter based in New York. She received her B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Tokyo Zokei University in Japan. Her paintings are based on scenes encountered in everyday life, such as meals, interiors, and fleeting landscapes. Rather than treating these scenes simply as records, she explores what painting can make visible as she translates them onto the canvas. While the scenes may initially appear familiar, their relationships and sense of distance gradually become less certain the longer they are viewed. Through the relationships between elements and shifting perspectives, Otsuki explores distance, time, and subtle emotional shifts within everyday experience. She often returns to the same motifs, leaving quick brushstrokes visible on the surface while attending to relationships and distances between elements. In exhibitions, she often presents an odd number of works, leaving a sense that something remains unfinished or still in progress rather than forming a fully resolved whole. Through painting, Otsuki examines the space between familiarity and distance, clarity and ambiguity. Her paintings contain a sense of unease and dissonance, while also retaining the quietness of observing events from a slight distance.

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