Kazuyo Kinoshita was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1939 and died in 1994. Kinoshita was a rare female conceptual artist working in Japan in the 1960s. This was a time of great artistic fervour. From the middle of the 1950s to the early 70s, the Gutai group was at the center of artistic activities in Kansai, a region in the western part of Japan where the artist lived. Other groups such as High Red Centre and Neo Dada were also experimenting at this time. Kinoshita had her first solo exhibition among the flourishing of such groups in 1966. In the wake of this she became closely associated with the Kobe Group ‘I’ which was founded by Tatsuo Kawaguchi and would inform many of her conceptual ideas.

Kinoshita’s practice spanned photography and painting. A constant theme in her work was an investigation into the question of ‘self’ and ‘existence’. Kinoshita was keenly aware of her own mortality and through her art sought to affirm and explore her own position in relation to the ‘whole’, to the Absolute. Parallels can be drawn with Brazilian conceptual artists Mira Schendel and Lygia Clark who also expressed their conceptual ideas through lines and space on a two-dimensional plane.

Kinoshita’s work belongs in numerous public collections including: The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Itami City Museum of Art; Osaka City Museum of Modern Art; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art; Nagoya City Art Museum; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art; Fukuyama Museum of Art; Wakayama Museum of Modern Art.

Recent solo exhibitions include In Search of Substantiality - Unifying the Absolute and the Relative, Yumiko Chiba Associates viewing room shinjuku, Tokyo and Kazuyo Kinoshita Memorial Museum, Kobe, Japan (2014-15).

selected works