{"id":115483,"date":"2013-04-24T19:07:01","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T22:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=115483"},"modified":"2015-06-08T14:20:36","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T17:20:36","slug":"austerity-and-intuition-in-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/austerity-and-intuition-in-balance\/","title":{"rendered":"Austerity and intuition in balance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Untitled

Images Tomie Ohtake Cultural Institute<\/span>Untitled work from 1980: \u201cPainting is my daily routine,\u201d says OhtakeImages Tomie Ohtake Cultural Institute<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Tomie Ohtake will be 100 this coming November.\u00a0 The celebrations will take place throughout the year and have already begun on the occasion of the opening of two exhibitions that beautifully sum up two of the artist\u2019s striking features: her lasting and well-honed experimental nature and her great understanding of the art of her times. While the collection Correspond\u00eancias<\/i> (Correspondences) on display at the cultural institute that bears her name establishes connections\u00a0 \u2013 albeit tenuous \u2013 between her work and the work of a wide array of artists (like Cildo Meireles, Mira Schendel, Paulo Pasta and Cadu, among others) built around three central aspects of her production: color, texture, and gesture, the sample for viewing at the Nara Roesler Gallery through March 23 reveals an artist in full operating mode, still capable of reinventing herself.\u00a0 In three recently completed (2012\/2013) series of large paintings, Ohtake seems to have stepped up the pace of her brush in exploring the relations between depth and luminosity in seemingly monochrome paintings (in yellow, blue and green), surgically punctuated by red. \u201cI\u2019m interested in transparency and depth,\u201d she says in a recent interview with Art Nexus<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\u201cPainting is my daily routine,\u201d Ohtake likes to say – she who has spent over six decades investigating the primordial aspects of painting with a nearly devotional zeal.\u00a0 Even though she says that she has liked to draw since she was a child in Japan, Ohtake only became a painter at nearly age 40, over 15 years after coming to Brazil.\u00a0 She came to visit a brother, but ended up staying because of the Sino-Japanese War.\u00a0 She married, had children and became a Brazilian citizen.\u00a0 Initial art lessons were given by her first and only teacher Keisuke Sugano. The artist\u2019s first figurative compositions date back to the early 1950s, but she quickly adopted informal abstraction and went on to doggedly explore the containment and materiality of gesture.<\/p>\n

According to several critics, she reached maturity during the decade that followed, when she conducted experiments such as \u201cblind paintings\u201d at the suggestion of critic and friend M\u00e1rio Pedrosa.\u00a0 Shunning any particular group or trend, and with a highly self-taught style, Ohtake casts aside the richness introduced by contact with and observation of the production that surrounds her.\u00a0 As Paulo Herkenhoff stated, \u201cOhtake is a vantage point from which to look at Brazilian art.\u201d Or as Miguel Chaia sums it up, her work allows an \u201capproximation between geometry and informalism, combining the contradictions of Brazilian society with her own history of art.\u201d\u00a0 Thus he sees in her work a type of synthesis, or peaceful coexistence, between often opposite poles like East and West, the austerity of the shape and the lyricism of the color, or figuration and abstraction, for example.<\/p>\n

\"Ohtake:

Images Tomie Ohtake Cultural Institute<\/span>Ohtake: distinctly self-taught workImages Tomie Ohtake Cultural Institute<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Throughout her extensive career, Ohtake has explored various ways of handling a very limited range of issues:\u00a0 her geometric shapes are nearly always curved, marked by the sinuousness of the circle and the spiral; the colors tend to be placed not in contrast, but rather in balance, even when they are more strident like those of the 1970s; gesture is normally contained and elegant, appealing to the notion of choreography or musicality.<\/p>\n

Her r\u00e9sum\u00e9 consists of more than 20 international biennials, 90 solo exhibitions and nearly 400 group exhibitions, including not only paintings, but also other areas like engraving, sculpture and public works, which she has done since the 1980s.\u00a0 The most recent of these, a giant metal figure eight, was unveiled last year in Tokyo.\u00a0 Her public works, which make up a significant portion of her career, will be the subject of a book by Paulo Herkenhoff whose release in November will coincide with the opening of her exhibition Gesto e raz\u00e3o geom\u00e9trica<\/i> (Gesture and Geometric Reason), crowning her centenary celebration.<\/p>\n

Before that, in August, the Tomie Ohtake Cultural Institute (designed and run by her sons Ruy and Ricardo Ohtake) will also house an exhibition that will display projective aspects of the artist\u2019s work, her intimate exercises, studies on procedure, drawings, collages and other works. The exhibition will offer a tangible way to get to know the applied researcher who goes hand in hand with the intuitive artist, and to confirm \u2013 in the words of Ol\u00edvio Tavares de Ara\u00fajo \u2013 that she has given \u201cnearly equal doses of reason and emotion.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As she turns 100 this year, Tomie Ohtake displays a lasting experimental nature and an understanding of her times ","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"coauthors":[142],"class_list":["post-115483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115483"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=115483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}