Menu of the day | Nobuko Tsuchiya

‘Nobuko Tsuchiya’s works arise from fundamental questions about the world and our place within it: why are we here? Is there an order to the universe, and do we have any control over it? Faced with the need to know, scientists experiment, philosophers imagine. Nobuko’s strange assemblages of materials and found objects draw on both approaches.

The artist confronts the daily contradictions of reality, between what we know and what we perceive, between the apparent stillness of things and the constant movement of the atoms that make them up. Words, objects, plants, animals, humans: everything is matter. Everything is movement. It is outside language that she seeks to understand and interact with the world.

The materials that attract her – wool, resin, metal, wax, feathers, plaster – are not yet transformed or tainted by intention. With a flexibility that no language could afford without becoming incomprehensible, Nobuko assembles, dismantles, melts, hardens, crushes, spreads and inflates to compose an instinctive grammar where forms are always suggested and accompanied rather than constrained. She sculpts as one tends to a garden.

To enter one of her environments is to physically experience a thought: to see and to feel oneself seeing. Faced with the vastness of space, and the joint failure of science and philosophy to provide a satisfactory answer, her works put our egos into perspective by taking us on a journey to the deepest depths and the furthest reaches of our being.’ – Antoine Champenois

Nobuko Tsuchiya (Japan) is this year’s laureate of the Jean Chatelus Residency Programme – Antoine de Galbert Foundation x Cité internationale des arts. Created in 2024 in tribute to the collector Jean Chatelus, this programme selects one artist each year whose practice resonates with the spirit of his collection, for a one-year residency at the Cité internationale des arts.