About the artist:

Sekine was a founding member of ‘Gutai,’ an avant-garde art collective formed under the leadership of Jiro Yoshihara. Yoshio Sekine (1922 – 1989) was born in the Wakayama Prefecture. Sekine came to meet Jiro Yoshihara through the Jiyu Bijutsu Kyoukai and was involved in the founding of Gutai in 1954, and in 1955 had participated in the “7th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition” (Tokyo). Sekine took part in “The International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai,” an exhibition curated by Michel Tapié that was held at the Takashimaya Department Store in Namba (1958, Osaka, later travelling to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki), and the “5th Gutai Exhibition” (1958, Tokyo). He later moved to Tokyo upon leaving Gutai in 1959. Sekine presented his painting depicting an abacus for the “15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition” (1963, Tokyo), and has since created series of paintings pursuing his motifs of ‘abacuses,’ ‘gates,’ ‘wagons,’ and ‘Mt. Fuji.’ His later group exhibitions include “Trends in Contemporary Art – Paintings and Sculptures,” the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (1964, Kyoto); “Modern Japanese Art,” the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1975, Tokyo); “The 1960’s: A Decade of Change in Contemporary Japanese Art,” the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1981, Tokyo, later travelling to the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto). Sekine is a recipient of the Mainichi Award (1952) and the 2nd Nagaoka Contemporary Art Museum Award (1965).