To mark its centenary, São Paulo displays works by Tomie Ohtake.
Anyone who passed through the Consolação metro station, the Latin America Memorial, Ladeira da Memória, or Avenida 23 de Maio has encountered some of her works; the works of the Japanese artist, who arrived in Brazil in 1936 and became a naturalized citizen, are also present in other cities in commemoration of her centenary.
Elaine Patricia Cruz
Reporter from Agência Brasil
São Paulo – At the Memorial da América Latina, on Ladeira da Memória, or on Avenida 23 de Maio – works by visual artist Tomie Ohtake are scattered throughout various public spaces in the city of São Paulo. Anyone who passes through or has passed through the Consolação metro station, for example, will recognize one of her works: four panels of different colors, made with glazed tiles, representing the seasons of the year.
Works by the Japanese artist, who arrived in Brazil in 1936 and became a naturalized citizen, are also present in other cities. Sculptures, panels, and abstract forms decorate, for example, various public spaces in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Curitiba, and Brasília.
In the centennial year of the artist, the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo honors her with the exhibition "Tomie Ohtake - Correspondences," which runs until March 24th and seeks to establish relationships of approximation and contrast between the works she produced from 1956 to 2013 and those of other artists, such as Nuno Ramos, Alfredo Volpi, and Cildo Meireles. The exhibition is curated by Agnaldo Farias and Paulo Miyada and showcases Tomie's pictorial work.
"This exhibition, first and foremost, is the beginning of the celebrations for Tomie Ohtake's 100th birthday. We decided to start the celebration by holding an exhibition with Tomie's works from her entire career, and to think of it as a party. In the same way that at a party we invite friends to visit, we wanted Tomie's works to receive friendly works, that shared interests, subjects and ways of thinking," said Paulo Miyada, in an interview with Agência Brasil.
According to the curator, the exhibition is based on three axes, which are constant concerns in Tomie's work: color (and its contrasts), gesture (the curves and spirals present in her works), and materiality (the texture of the materials). "Tomie's work is very rich in the way she reinvents approaches to subjects that are very common in art in general, and in painting specifically. Tomie managed to deal with this in a very inventive and reinventive way over the years. This exhibition ends up being a great opportunity to discover a variety of approaches to painting, color, gesture, and materiality," said Miyada.
For him, Tomie's main contribution is exploring all the possibilities of abstraction, which are not based on mathematics or calculation, but on intuition and invention. "Often, we think of abstract art as having a very geometric and calculated situation where the painter acts almost like a mathematician, but Tomie's work is precisely the opposite of that."
Another exhibition opens on the 23rd of this month at the Nara Roesler Gallery. It is a solo show, also curated by Agnaldo Farias, featuring recent sculptures and paintings.
More information about the artist's work and about the Tomie Ohtake-Correspondences exhibition, which is free, can be found on the website of the institute that bears her name.
Editing: Nadia Franco