Visual artist Eri Maeda Follow.Art Card

About me

Eri Maeda is a Japanese artist based in Paris. Her work explores the tension between what is shown and what is suppressed—especially around gender, emotion, and social roles. Drawing from her experience growing up in Japan and living in France, she creates forms that are playful, awkward, and emotionally charged.

She is interested in how people are taught to behave—how we learn to be quiet, polite, or invisible—and what happens when those rules don’t fit. Her sculptures often take on strange, creature-like shapes that suggest something repressed trying to surface. Humor is a key part of her practice. It allows her to speak about difficult things while keeping the viewer engaged, open, and sometimes uncomfortable.

Her work raises quiet but persistent questions: What do we accept as normal? What are we hiding behind politeness? What stories shape our identities—and how can we rewrite them?

By embracing imperfection, emotion, and absurdity, Maeda builds a world where constraint and resistance exist side by side—and where something private, even hidden, begins to take form.