Brazilians hail centenarian artist Tomie Ohtake

AFP/Sao PaoloJapanese-born, naturalised Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake is being honoured after celebrating her 100th birthday this week, with the Sao Paulo gallery named after her and other venues holding major retrospectives. The Instituto Tomie Ohtake threw open its doors yesterday to show its ‘Gesto e Razao Geometrica’ (Gesture and Geometric Reason) exhibition of some 80 works - mainly paintings - running to February 2. Further Brazilian homage to the Kyoto-born artist will come from the central city of Belo Horizonte, whose Centro Cultural Minas Tenis Clube arts centre is displaying 50 paintings, sculptures and engravings at a new gallery. Speaking to broadcaster Globo on Wednesday, the day before she turned 100 years old, Ohtake said: “I don’t feel my age. I stay here (working) until it’s time to go to bed.” The show in Sao Paulo, home to the majority of some 1.8mn Brazilians of Japanese origin, ranges from oil on canvas works from the 1960s - highlighting Ohtake’s trademark geometric abstraction - to giant creations made out of metal tubing. Curator Paulo Herkenhoff called Ohtake, who still works from her home studio, a pillar of contemporary Brazilian art. “Unlike Western geometric rationality, Ohtake is constantly experimenting with the imprecise,” he said. She made a major contribution to transcultural Brazilian abstract art using “aesthetic images enveloping spiritual values, such as enso, the imperfect circle in Zen Buddhism and the relation of form with shadow - a traditional value of Japanese culture,” Herkenhoff added.