01/10/2026
CARPE DIEM: HARUMI TANAKA’S FIRST SOLO SHOW OPENS AT STUDIO 73, BRIXTON
London, September 2026 — In 2019, Studio 73 founder Adrian Flower watched the everyday cordiality of Brixton Market — the greetings and smiles exchanged across every background — and saw in it the model for an art prize: open to everyone, judged on nothing but the work. That idea became the Brixton Art Prize, launched in 2022 with 41 shortlisted artists showing at Department Store, Brixton.
The first winner was Harumi Tanaka, for Self Portrait As A Doll. This October, four years after Studio 73 itself went quiet and re-opened in a new railway arch space, Tanaka returns with Carpe Diem — her first solo exhibition since that win.
Tanaka makes ball-jointed dolls — sculpted, carved and sanded by hand — a craft she first learned in Tokyo in 1990, in a part-time class under the doll artist Yotsuya Simon, while she was studying philosophy. She spent six years there before moving to London to study Mixed Media Art at the University of Westminster.
“I usually go straight to modelling,” she says of her process. “Developing the shape through trial and error — building the clay up, then carving and sanding it down.”
For years, she says, her focus was purely aesthetic. That’s changed. “After experiencing a couple of life-changing events, I use my dolls in a narrative way — to express fear, resentment, despair, restore and hope.” In her words, the work returns again and again to life and death, eros and thanatos. “It’s a type of bodily discharge,” she says. “It comes out of me.”
The exhibition opens with a Private View on Thursday 29 October, 18:00–21:00, and continues Thursday to Sunday, 13:00–18:00, until Sunday 15 November 2026, at Studio 73, Railway Arch 18, Valentia Place, Brixton SW9 8PJ.
Tickets for the Private View are free and available via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/carpe-diem-by-harumi-tanaka-tickets-2001402094541
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