Tomie Ohtake: The Ultimate Works at Nara Roesler

Nara Roesler's New York space in Chinatown is showing "The Ultimate Works," a solo presentation of Tomie Ohtake, through October 24. Curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, who also serves as the gallery's artistic director, the show pairs paintings from the last year of her life with works from her early "blind paintings."

Ohtake was born in Kyoto in 1913 and moved to Brazil in 1936. She began painting in the 1950s under the Japanese artist Keiya Sugano, working first on figurative studies before turning to abstraction. Between 1960 and 1963 she made the blind paintings, an experiment suggested by the critic Mário Pedrosa in which she painted blindfolded, leaving more room for intuition and bodily sensitivity. In the 1970s and 1980s she developed a language of organic forms, monochrome fields and subtle gradations of color, later extended to sculpture and public space. She took part in twenty international biennials, including six editions of the São Paulo Bienal, where she received the Itamaraty Prize, as well as those of Venice, Tokyo, Havana and Cuenca. Her work is held by MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, SFMOMA and M+.

The exhibition is built around a link between her beginning and her end. In the blind paintings, she started from the darkness of covered eyes in search of a new kind of visibility. In her final paintings, made around her hundredth birthday in 2013–14, she arrived at dense, opaque white fields. Pérez-Oramas reads these not simply as last works chronologically but as a summing-up of a century-long practice.

The white paintings are built from accumulated layers of paint. From a distance they read as monochrome planes; up close, ridges and brush marks emerge and cast shadows on the canvas, giving the surface a near-sculptural quality. The same gesture continues in the sculptures, made from white tubular steel. Their organic forms twist and loop like a thread suspended in air, and the tubes catch light and shadow in changing ways, as if a brushstroke had been made physical.

Works on view include an untitled oil on canvas from 1965 (135 × 110 cm), an untitled acrylic on canvas from 2014 (120 × 150 × 3.5 cm), and an untitled 2006 sculpture in automotive paint on tubular carbon steel (175 × 210 × 125 cm).