The Japanese-Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake was a leading proponent of an informal, gestural, and lyrical abstract mode of painting in postwar Brazil. Despite having close affinities with the Rio de Janeiro-based Neo Concrete group (active 1959??1961), particularly in opposing the excessive rationalism of São Paulo’s Concrete art movement, she never formally joined any group. Instead, Ohtake developed an individual visual language that, although geometrical, centered mostly on new ways of using color, pigment, and paint. Recently referred to as an “imperfect geometry,” her approach responded to a chief concern with the related processes of making and experiencing the work. “I have always drawn curves and lines, but I do everything by hand, so it’s not perfect,” she told Folha de São Paulo in 2013. “I like painting free forms.” Created at a departure point from the more angular, boxed-in forms of the 1950s and early 1960s, Untitled of 1968 is among the first works in a set of looser symmetrical compositions that also includes Composição em Amarelo (1966) at the Museo de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). In Untitled two slightly vertical masses in complementary shades of aubergine meet at the center of the canvas, effectively dividing it into two panels of equal lateral pull. Emerging from these gestural brushstrokes, the darker and lighter purple forms reveal a sinuous geometric arrangement complemented by an equally significant concern with gradating color and building up texture. As in other works from this period, Untitled thus straddles the localized strain of geometric abstraction (in its composition and structure) and the international Color Field movement (in its cool and austere technique).
Tomie Ohtake was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1913. In 1936, at the age of twenty-three, she traveled to Brazil to visit a brother who had already settled there. With the uncertainties and tensions that revolved around the start of World War II, she decided to remain in São Paulo. There, she got married and had a family. It was not until later in her life, in the 1950s, that Ohtake took up painting, after being exposed to the work in the studio of another Brazilian of Japanese descent, the painter Keisuke Sugano. Ohtake began with figurative subjects, but quickly became attracted to nonrepresentational forms and abstraction. She had her first exhibition in 1957 at the Sãlao Nacional de Arte Moderna, and in 1961 participated in the VI São Paulo Biennial. She was also part of the Venice and Tokyo biennials in the 1970s, and also participated in more than twenty international biennials throughout her life. In the 1980s, Ohtake focused more on the public art and site-specific sculptures for which she is well known in Brazil and Japan. These large-scale installations— located in cities such as São Paulo, Guarulhos, and Tokyo—gave life to her two-dimensional linear abstract paintings. Her work was bound by an interest in the repetitive and meditative qualities found in color, composition, and form. In the years leading up to her death, Ohtake continued to pursue public art commissions including mosaic murals for the Consolação Station of the São Paulo metro as well as a wave-shaped sculpture commemorating the 80th anniversary of Japanese immigration to Brazil (2008). Throughout her long life, Ohtake had more than 120 solo shows, 400 collective shows, and won twenty-eight important awards. In 2001 her son Ruy designed São Paulo’s Instituto Tomie Ohtake in her honor as a space to host local and international visual arts exhibitions.
