Toko Shinoda: Works from the 1980s

About the Exhibition

Toko Shinoda turns 108 years old this spring. During the 90 years of her career as an artist, she shifted from calligraphy to painting at an early stage and has since produced abstract paintings using sumi ink in a distinctive style that is recognized both in and outside Japan.
The present exhibition shows her works from the 1980s, when Toko established her own painting style and greatly increased the refinement of her work. Until then, in the 1970s, she had produced elegant and delicate works supported by Japanese tradition. But in the 1980s, her style changed, featuring the tension of intersection of planes and lines, and the serial arrangement of vertical and dynamic lines. While exhibiting her paintings in Japan and overseas, she also took up lithography, book design, title lettering, and also wrote light essays. In 1979 she was awarded the 27th Japan Essayists’ Club Prize for the first collection of her works, Sumi iro (The Colors of Sumi), and subsequently published many essays. This diversity of her activities further broadened and deepened the range of her painting in the 1980s. Some of her works from that decade are on display here.