TOMIE OHTAKE

A paramount figure in Brazilian art during the second half of the 20^th and the first decades of the 21^st centuries, Tomie Ohtake is known for having produced one the most compelling body of works in late modern art in the Americas, embracing painting, sculpture, print-making, drawing, collage, theatre staging, and monumental civic-scaled works. After a seminal period under the influence of lyrical abstraction and ‘tachism’, her work developed into a daring investigation on the density of painting that contrasted vis-à-vis the constructive-geometric and rational concrete art trending in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. Ohtake produced paintings notably made while blinding her eyes that feature-rich textural surfaces. These striking ‘blind paintings’ are of monumental historical significance in the Americas as they emphasize a corporeal density, contrasting against the backdrop of schematic concrete art, and proposing a bold phenomenological standpoint that affirms the whole human body—and not only its eyes—at the root of visual art. During the 1970s and 1980s, Ohtake produced an exceptional series of paintings featuring a colour-field, organic-driven figural version of abstraction. These works, unique for their beauty and masterful execution, and a peak within that period, can be linked to the whole tradition of vernacular modernism that took place in Brazil starting in the 1920s with the work of artists such as Tarsila do Amaral and Emiliano di Cavalcanti. They depict abstract bodies masterfully embedded in subtle variations of monochromatic fields. Drawing from her Japanese upbringing and her understanding of visual art as a topological experience, she later pursued her work as a painter, theater-stage designer, and sculptor, which beautifully manifested in her late tubular structures and paintings of impeccable textural whiteness, created as she was approaching 102 years old.

With works pertaining to each of these fundamental periods, Visible Persistence: Tomie Ohtake (1957–2014) foregrounds the marked phases of the artist’s career, celebrating every stage in its distinction, but also stressing Ohtake’s drive to capture the density of space, colour as a generative force, and the corporal experience of form. The exhibition proposes a selection of key works, which together punctuate the defining phases in the artist’s career, offering a succinct retrospective of her oeuvre.