10 Facts About Tomie Ohtake

Tomie Ohtake was a Japanese Brazilian visual artist.

Tomie Ohtake was one of the main representatives of informal abstractionism in Brazil.

In 1936, when she was twenty-three years old, Ohtake traveled to Brazil to visit a brother but could not return to Japan due to the Pacific Theater of World War II occurring there.

Tomie Ohtake therefore settled in Sao Paulo where she married the agronomist Ushio Tomie Ohtake, later giving birth to her son Rui, an architect, and Ricardo, former secretary of culture for the state of Sao Paulo.

Early on in her career, Tomie Ohtake moved to figurative painting and became a key figure in the Brazilian geometric abstraction movement.

In 1988, Tomie Ohtake was awarded the Order of Rio Branco for the public sculpture commemorating the 80th anniversary of Japanese immigration in Sao Paulo and in 2006 she was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit.

The Instituto Tomie Ohtake was opened in 2001 in Sao Paulo as a non-profit museum showcasing the artist's works as well as local and international exhibitions celebrating contemporary architecture and visual culture.

Towards the end of her life in 2013, Tomie Ohtake began a series of monochrome paintings which she worked on until the end of her life.

Tomie Ohtake died on 12 February 2015 at the age of 101 in the Hospital Sirio-Libanes in Sao Paulo, suffering from pneumonia.

Tomie Ohtake's work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate.