One of the main representatives of abstract art in Brazil, Tomie Ohtake was born in Kyoto in 1913, and 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. Ohtake began to experiment with various printmaking methods during the 1970s and, beginning in the late 1980s, undertook large-scale sculptural projects and public works in São Paulo and neighboring cities. Having worked until very late in life, Tomie Ohtake passed away in 2015, when she was 101 years old.
Tomie Ohtake was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1913, lived in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2015. Her works have been extensively exhibited worldwide. Important recent shows include: Tomie Ohtake: cor e corpo, at Caixa Cultural Brasília (2018), in Brasília, Brazil; Tomie Ohtake em Curitiba – Vultos, fissuras e clareiras, at Memorial da Cidade (2018), in Curitiba, Brazil; Tomie Ohtake: nas pontas dos dedos, at Galeria Nara Roesler (2017), in São Paulo, Brazil; Tomie por Tizuka Yamasaki, at Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS) (2015), in São Paulo, Brazil. Main recent group show include: Ateliê de Gravura: da tradição à experimentação, at Fundação Iberê Camargo (FIC) (2019), in Porto Alegre, Brazil; Surface Work, at Victoria Miro (2018), in London, UK; Arte moderna na coleção da Fundação Edson Queiroz, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal (2017); The World is our Home. A Poem on Abstraction, at Para Site (2015), in Hong Kong, China; Fusion: Tracing Asian Migration to the Americas Through AMA’s Collection, at Art Museum of the Americas (2013), in Washington, USA. Her works are included in important collections, such as: China Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), Caracas, Venezuela; M+ Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong, China; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil; and Tate Modern, London, UK; among others.