"woman at the restaurant" Painting

My work explores the paradoxes inherent in the human condition: love and hate, joy and sadness, amusement and boredom, birth and death. At its core lies a sense of wildness and unpredictability, an uncontrollable energy that mirrors life itself. I bring together the familiar and the unfamiliar within the same setting, blending elements that evoke recognition with those that challenge perception. This tension creates a sense of purposeful foreboding, as distortions in composition, color contrasts, and subject matter subtly unsettle the viewer.


Yuko Nabeta was born in Japan 1973. She moved to New Jersey for few years study English. In 2000, she came to London, she graduated her BA Drawing at Camberwell College of Art. Since then she works in her studio in East London.

She works primarily with oil paint and charcoal, mediums that mirror the grimy, fluid nature of reality. Recently, I have been focused on large-scale charcoal drawings. These pieces begin as unhinged, mysterious forms, emerging gradually through an embodied process of layering, smudging, and erasing with my hands and rubber. This tactile interaction feels sculptural, as though the image reveals itself over time rather than being pre-conceived. The process is unpredictable, and that unpredictability is essential to the work.