Sakae Ozawas paintings are far removed from reality and everyday life. They unfold in fantastical and seemingly magical places. The artist says that she rarely produces work based on fairy tales or folklore but even so, there is a sensibility about her paintings that calls to mind well known tales by authors such as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Her works are playful, joyous and naively enchanting. It is only through closer inspection, however, that we realize that, like those fairy tales, there is a darker side to the enchantment, a sense of unease that pervades the beauty and a feeling that all is not all right in the forest.
Sakae Ozawa was born in 1980 in Shiga, Japan. In 2003 she graduated from Kyoto University of Art and Design with a BA honors degree. She graduated top of her class from the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste Wien (the University of Applied Arts Vienna). Ozawa has exhibited extensively in Kyoto and Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited at SHContemporary, Shanghai as Best of Discovery 2008: Japan and, most recently, at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan in 2010.
