Artist Profile

Kotao Tomozawa (b. 1999, Bordeaux, France) is a Japanese artist whose distinctive portraiture explores the tension between fragility and brutality, softness and unease. After moving to Japan in 2004, she studied oil painting at Tokyo University of the Arts, completing her undergraduate degree in 2022 and a master’s degree in oil painting in 2024. Her works combine slime-like materials with organic motifs, meticulously rendering texture, translucency, and softness to create images that are both alluring and unsettling. Through an apparently gentle visual language, Tomozawa reveals the contradictions and complexities of the world, distilling intense and sometimes cruel realities into deceptively simple forms. In 2019, she founded the art unit Tororoen with her mother, Mimiyo Tomozawa. Her recognitions include the Kume Award in 2019 and selection for the Art Plaza Grand Prize at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Japan.