Tomie ohtake biography samples
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tomie ohtake
One of the main representatives of abstract art in Brazil, Tomie Ohtake (b. 1913, Kyoto, Japan - d. 2015, São Paulo, Brazil) moved to Brazil in 1936. Her career as an artist began at the age of 37, when she became a member of the Seibi group, which brought together artists of Japanese descent. In the late 1950s, when she left behind an initial phase of figurative studies in painting, she immersed herself in abstract explorations. In this phase, she performed a series of paintings which became known as Blind Paintings, where she would blindfold herself in experiments that challenged the ideas which grounded the Brazilian Neo-concrete movement, also bringing sensibility and intuition to the fore of her practice.
In 1957, invited by critic Mário Pedrosa, she presented her first solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, which was followed by her participation in the São Paulo Biennial in 1961. Oh
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EVERY TIME AN ARTIST DIES…
Every time an artist dies, a star forever dims its light in the firmament.
Tomie Ohtake and Tetsuya Ishida were both from Japan. They were both painters, and they are both deceased. Their style of painting couldn’t be more dissimilar. Their views of the world and the reality they experienced even more divergent; their life spans, astoundingly disparate.
1913: Tomie Ohtake is born in Kyoto, Japan.
1973: Sixty years later, Tetsuya Ishida was born in Yaizu, Shizuoka, Japan.
They lived in different times, during their youth, and experienced different social and personal problems, but they poured their hearts and souls into their work, manifesting their vision in a ceremonial act of reaching out to others and communicating joy, and angst.
At the age of 23 Ohtake went to Brazil to visit her brother in 1936. The Sino-Japanese war broke out, and soon afterwards WWII, making her return to Japan impossible. Ohtake settled in São Paulo, Br
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Tomie Ohtake
Tomie Ohtake arrived in São Paulo from Kyoto in 1936, during a third major phase of Japanese migration to Brazil. Intentionally cultivating the image of a withdrawn persona, Ohtake left all her works untitled and shied away from offering any interpretation in public or private. From her technique and preparation, however, we can learn much about her creative process. This untitled abstraction from 1978, for example, is emblematic of a turning point within her production, traceable to the early 1970s, when she moved away from an expressionist style into hard-edged, graphic, and optical compositions. At this time, Ohtake experimented with silkscreen and used magazine cut-outs and other ephemera to man preparatory collage studies for her canvases. The vibrant colour juxtapositions of her works also invited unexpected juxtapositions with artists like Claudio Tozzi and Antônio Henrique Amaral – notably associated with Pop Art and new figuration – with whom she shared an ex