Kano Mitsuo (1933-) was born in Tokyo and moved to Kamakura in 1960. Now over eighty, he still continues to create work with more vigour than ever before. Kano appeared on the art scene as a print maker in the post-war 1950s: a difficult age economically speaking, but one in which the arts were thriving. Rather than replicate the new styles and avant-garde trends he saw around him, however, Kano remained committed to pursuing his artistic goal, namely the serenity of the spirit in isolation. In the years that followed, this uniquely inventive creator has continued to tap this rich seam with great diligence.

In 1955 Kano, an almost entirely self-taught print-maker, paid for his own print collection Plants to be published. The following year his work was displayed at the Takemiya Gallery at the recommendation of the poet and critic Takiguchi Shuzo. His dream-like style earned him high acclaim from the first, and throughout the 1960s he won a succession of awards at the print-making exhibitions that were prevalent at the time. As time went on, he began to expand his repertoire beyond the black and white copperplate etchings of his early period. The late 1960s marked the beginning of his zinc plate metal work and multi-colored prints, while the 1970s saw him turning his hand to lithographs, encaustic painting, color intaglio and the like. Later, around 1980, Kano began to produce a large number of works in oil, as well as the art objects and hand-bound books he was creating at the time.

This exhibition, the first to be held in a public art museum since the large-scale retrospective exhibition of the artist's work in Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in 2000, brings together the quintessential elements of Kano’s creative endeavors that have spanned over 50 years, from his printmaking of the 1950s to his most recent oil paintings. The exhibition provides us with the opportunity to view the shifting of Kano’s inventive visions as they shift back and forth between surface and form, word and sculpture across the artist’s many mediums. Not only this, however; the rūpa that appears in the exhibition’s title—the concept of material form within Buddhism—is an expression of that which is concealed at the very heart of Kano’s work, namely the questioning of color itself. This questioning serves as a key to opening up new experiences for us as viewers.

Courtesy of Galerie Tokyo Humanite