Back to list

Kenjiro Okazaki

(1955)

A painter, architect, and sculptor, the creativity of Kenjiro Okazaki (岡崎 乾二郎), who was born in 1955 in Tokyo, has evolved freely in various genres and draws on various sources. A great connoisseur of art history, from the Renaissance to the present day, his abstract paintings are the fruit of a combination of his talent and erudition.

Constructed colour forms, painted in thick layers and in a transparent manner, stand out against white backgrounds. The marks applied to the white canvas, which have an immediate visual effect, are reminiscent of ideograms painted on paper. As in writing, a form enters into a dialogue with another and, when they are viewed, they interact with one another.

More than just abstract paintings, Okazaki works are poems about life⎯poems that we view with freedom and enchantment. His art is a veritable combination of writing and abstract painting.

Okazaki is also very active as a theoretician and critic, and is also the author and co-author of several books.

Personal exhibitions

2019-2020

2019

– Kenjiro Okazaki’s retrospective exhibition, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Japan

– FIAC Paris , Blum and Poe Gallery, France

2019

– Abstraction in Asia : From 1960 to Nowadays,China – Japan – Korea, Vazieux Art Gallery Paris

2019

– Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s, Blum and Poe, LA, USA

2002

– Participated as an artist in and director of the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice biennale, Italy

1994-1995

– Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against The Sky, Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

1989

– Europaria 89 – Exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Art, S.M.A.K., Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium

Public exhibitions

– National Museum of Modern ART, Tokyo, Japan

– Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan

– Ohara Art Museum, Kurashiki, Japan

– Osaka Museum of Modern Art, Japan

– Hyō go District Art Museum, Japan

– Toyama, Modern Art Museum Japan

– Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan

– National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan

– Contemporary Art Museum, Hiroshima, Japan

– Takamatsu Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan Benesse

– Art Site Naoshima, Japan

– Aichi Disctrict Art Museum, Japan

– Toyota Municipal Museum, Japan

Selected works