Tomie Ohtake


Tomie Ohtake was a Japanese-Brazilian visual artist. Her work includes paintings, prints and sculptures. She was one of the main representatives of informal abstractionism in Brazil.

Biography

Ohtake was born in 1913 in Kyoto. In 1936, when she was twenty-three years old, Ohtake traveled to Brazil to visit a brother but could not return to Japan due to the Pacific theatre of World War II occurring there. Ohtake settled herself in São Paulo with her husband, her son Ruy being born there in 1938, and started painting in 1951, after a visit to the studio of the painter Keisuke Sugano.
She had her first exhibition in 1957, in the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna and in 1961 she participated in the São Paulo Biennale. In 1972 she participated in the Prints section of the Venice Biennale and in 1978 of the Tokyo Biennale. She created dozens of public space sculptures from the late eighties; her work has been featured in several cities in Brazil, but especially in the state of São Paulo.
In 1988 Ohtake was awarded the Order of Rio Branco by the public sculpture commemorating the 80th anniversary of Japanese immigration in São Paulo, and in 2006 she was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit.
Tomie Ohtake was the mother of architects Ruy Ohtake and Ricardo Ohtake.
She died on February 12, 2015 at the age of 101. She was cremated.

Solo Exhibitions

Gallery