Hirose Fukashi - Snake - postwar Japanese modernist painting on shikishi
Vintage Japanese painting on shikishi by Hirose Fukashi depicting a snake.
The work dates from the postwar Shōwa period and is signed Fukashi with the artist’s personal red seal. It reflects the modernist and abstract visual language Hirose developed after the war. His intimate works on shikishi can be viewed as a two-dimensional extension of his sculptural practice, reducing recognizable motifs to concise, plastic forms. In this composition, the snake is brought close to a single continuous form, which makes the connection with his postwar interest in modernism and abstraction especially clear.
Hirose Fukashi (1903-1983) was a Japanese modernist sculptor and abstract artist from Fukuoka, and a full member of the sculpture section of Nika-kai. Before the war he worked mainly in figurative sculpture, while in the postwar period he turned toward abstraction and developed his own language of simplified forms. He participated in the establishment and postwar revival of the Fukuoka Prefectural Art Association and later served as its vice chairman.
His works are held by the Fukuoka Art Museum and the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art. In 1980, he received the Fukuoka City Culture Award for sculpture. One of Hirose’s most unusual and memorable public works was a monumental white-cement Brontosaurus created for Fukuoka Zoo in 1955. Measuring approximately 23 metres in length, the sculpture later became a local Fukuoka legend.
The work dates from the postwar Shōwa period and is signed Fukashi with the artist’s personal red seal. It reflects the modernist and abstract visual language Hirose developed after the war. His intimate works on shikishi can be viewed as a two-dimensional extension of his sculptural practice, reducing recognizable motifs to concise, plastic forms. In this composition, the snake is brought close to a single continuous form, which makes the connection with his postwar interest in modernism and abstraction especially clear.
Hirose Fukashi (1903-1983) was a Japanese modernist sculptor and abstract artist from Fukuoka, and a full member of the sculpture section of Nika-kai. Before the war he worked mainly in figurative sculpture, while in the postwar period he turned toward abstraction and developed his own language of simplified forms. He participated in the establishment and postwar revival of the Fukuoka Prefectural Art Association and later served as its vice chairman.
His works are held by the Fukuoka Art Museum and the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art. In 1980, he received the Fukuoka City Culture Award for sculpture. One of Hirose’s most unusual and memorable public works was a monumental white-cement Brontosaurus created for Fukuoka Zoo in 1955. Measuring approximately 23 metres in length, the sculpture later became a local Fukuoka legend.