Hirose Fukashi - Dog - postwar Japanese modernist painting on shikishi
Vintage Japanese painting on shikishi by Hirose Fukashi depicting a dog.
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 animals, plants, and human figures to concise, plastic forms.
Hirose Fukashi (1903–1983) was a Japanese modernist sculptor and abstract artist from Fukuoka. He was a full member of the sculpture section of Nika-kai, one of Japan’s most important independent art associations of the twentieth century. Hirose initially worked primarily with figurative sculpture, but after the war 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 surviving sculpture stands in a closed wooded area of the zoo and has gradually become 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 animals, plants, and human figures to concise, plastic forms.
Hirose Fukashi (1903–1983) was a Japanese modernist sculptor and abstract artist from Fukuoka. He was a full member of the sculpture section of Nika-kai, one of Japan’s most important independent art associations of the twentieth century. Hirose initially worked primarily with figurative sculpture, but after the war 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 surviving sculpture stands in a closed wooded area of the zoo and has gradually become a local Fukuoka legend.