NATSUKO TOYOFUKU
Natsuko Toyofuku - or Natsu for friends - came to Italy from Japan as a child and settled in the Lombardy capital, Milan. Her father, Tomomori Toyofuku, was a great talent of the 60s and 70s, inspiring Japanese sculpture with informal aspects, revolutionising a form of poetic expression that was still tied to tradition but ripe to open to new European and American trends.
"Natsu [...] inherited a predisposition for formal research and the desire to think outside the box."
Her mother, Kazuko, painted with great skill and gave life to refined compositions that owed much to the elegance and extemporaneousness of oriental calligrams. Natsu, therefore, inherited a predisposition for formal research and the desire to think outside the box.
In the 1980s, she experimented with unusual techniques and materials in a particularly expressive sphere - that of jewellery, which in Italy and abroad still had a bent for essentially classic looks - and presented styles that would prove to be successful in the future.
Natsu's origins in the field of jewellery date back to the 1980s, when she began to explore the sculptural quality that non-precious materials can offer in the hands of an instinctive and adventurous artist. She uses pearls, the magical "gem" that is so loved in Japanese culture, but also "non-noble" metals, such as silver and bronze, primarily using the lost-wax process.
