About the Exhibition

This exhibition presents the works of the oil painter Hiroshi Okutani (b. 1934), a member of the Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyokai [Independent Art Association] and the Japan Art Academy, and who was awarded the Order of Culture in 2017. Born in Sukumo in Kochi prefecture, Okutani studied under Takeshi Hayashi at Tokyo University of the Arts, going onto develop his own unique style of figurative painting that combined tense compositions and bold colouration with intricate brushwork and thinly layered paint. From his diverse oeuvre, whose subject matter ranges from cultural monuments to family portraits, this exhibition shows Okutani's seventy-two representative canvases as well as those thirty-eight early drawings which he made in Sukumo before entering the university.