Tomie ohtake biography sample

The home environment for Tomie Ohtake played major role in her life and work. The artist, who started producing in the 1950s, about to turn 40 years old, lived with her two children in a small house in the Mooca neighborhood in São Paulo. There, in a cramped space, she made her first works, passed from figuration to abstraction, and made some of the most important collections of works of her career, even with some limitations such as the need to have to go to the outside to power plainly what was painting with a retreat. In the 1970s, after moving to a new residence, the artist won greater freedom to produce. The space was no longer a constraint and larger formats and different techniques might be exploited as their creative impulses. Conceived by her son Ruy Ohtake, the house is designed to be configured as a large continuous environment in which the compact rooms designed as cells could be distributed freely. Their supporting structures, supported the side walls, leaving the clearance center as a wide corridor in which, from the gateway, you can view all built extension. However, after some renovations, other areas were attached, including a new studio that allowed new experiments and also included previous works and documents, stored in a technical reserve. It was in this large environment that Tomie Ohtake develop her work, spent time with her family and received friends, artists, critics, curators and journalists, creating a distinct network of relationships and collaborations. Her figure and her home are part of the memories of many generations of Brazilian art as synonymous with generosity and perseverance.

The recent opening of the Tomie Ohtake Institute, in the Pinheiros district of São Paulo, rekindled the sparkle in the eyes of those who resented never having seen again the appearance in the city of large scale cultural installations, since the opening of the São Paulo Cultural Center, 20 years ago. Linked to an office building , this space seems to have been born under the new auspices that steer cultural business: partnership with private enterprise. Planned by Ruy Ohtake, one of Tomie’s sons, the institute has 12 rooms for exhibitions, four rooms for shows, a restaurant, a bookstore, a design shop and a café.

The whole building took four years to be concluded, and was financed by Laboratório Aché, at a total cost of R$ 100 million. The support that FAPESP gave to the Tomie Ohtake Project (for cataloging and analyzing the artist’s work) also contributed to the institute’s success, which is already looked on favorably in cultural circles, mainly because of the events with which it was inaugurated – a retrospect of Tomie Ohtake’s career, a sample of an artist from Minas, Rosângela Rennó, and two collective exhibitions, on architecture and design. The research project was headed by Ricardo Ohtake, another of the artist’s sons and a director of the institute, and by Professor Miguel Wady Chaia, the coordinator of the Nucleus of Studies of Art, Meida and Politics (Neamp), of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).

The idea arose four years ago, when Ricardo perceived the need for drawing up a broader catalog of the artist’s work, which is spread over dozens of galleries, collectors and collections in various Brazilian states – not to mention the works located abroad. A first survey had been made on the occasion of a retrospect of the work of Tomie, which took place in 1

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, Brazil. She got married, had two children and started a new life.

After graduating from High School at the age of 19, Tetsuya Ishida began to feel the pressure his parents put on him to pursue an academic career and become a teacher or chemist. Ishida’s father, a member of parliament, and his mother, a housewife, denied him any financial support during his years at Musashino Art University.

Tomie Ohtake never learned Portuguese fluently, maintaining a strong accent that only added charm to her artistic persona.  She communicated as an artist through color and abstract form that she intuitively and organically brought to life. She says that upon arriving in Brazil she felt fascinated with the light of the sun, the magnificent yellow light glistening on the new landscape before her attentively amused eyes.

Ishida showed signs of his artistic talents from an early age, but he lived in times of enormous economic crisis; this would have a colossal impact on his work. During his years at th

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 make 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 exhibition at São Paulo’s Bonfiglioli Gallery in 1977. We might consider the powerful corporeality of Ohtake’s oeuvre through sheer scale and chromatic vibrancy.

—Sofia Gotti