Okokume

Life and training

Okokume is the working name of Laura Mas, born in 1985 in Mataro, near Barcelona, where she grew up and where she attended an art academy from the age of eight. She went on to the Llotja school of art and design in Barcelona, the school that counts Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro among its former students, and took a degree in advertising graphic design. She lives and works in Barcelona, sharing a studio with her partner.

Cosmic Girl

Her work belongs to the lowbrow tradition, crossed with contemporary street styles and a long standing attachment to Japanese manga. Out of her own preoccupations with the state of the environment she drew Cosmic Girl, a spirit with pink hair and turquoise skin who recurs through almost every painting. The artist describes her as travelling through space, tending to planets in need and restoring them to their former glory, and the character works as a messenger for ecological and social causes rather than as a mascot. Okokume has said that she knows the message will not reach everyone, but that she will be happy if it reaches some people.

Method

She paints in a mixture of acrylic, oil pastel and soft pastel, working the surface into a fluffy texture so that the figure's hair reads like the clouds she drifts upon. The colour is deliberately neon, which lends the whole image an extraterrestrial cast, and the cartoon drawing of the face sits against passages handled much more loosely. Titles are usually Spanish, among them Espejo, Sumergidos, Nunca, Mi Amanecer, Impedemento and Junto al rio.

Japan and collaborations

Okokume's audience is strongest in east Asia. She has shown in galleries and at fairs in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Seoul, Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin. In 2019 she exhibited with the artist Kasing Lung at JPS Gallery in Tokyo, in a joint show titled The Monsters, and the Cosmic Stars, and opened a Cosmic Girl cafe with him in Harajuku. She has published a book, The Arrival of Cosmic Girl, and has been profiled repeatedly in the Spanish and Hong Kong press, often on the theme that she is far better known in Japan than in her own country. She has also made commercial collaborations, including a run of phone cases and accessories with Casetify, and her print edition Sumergidos, issued with Avant Arte, sold out.

What a specialist examines

Most of what circulates is either a unique painting on canvas or a signed and numbered print edition, and the two are priced quite differently, so the first question about any piece is which of the two it is. An edition should carry the artist's signature and its number within the run, and the publisher's own release page is the best guide to the size of that run and to the paper used. Because the same character appears throughout the output and titles repeat across it, the title alone rarely identifies a work; the dimensions, the medium and the edition number are what pin it down. Condition matters more than it might appear, since the soft pastel passages are vulnerable to rubbing and should be examined under glass for smudging or transfer. The house has sold the print Espejo, which went comfortably above its upper estimate.