Itsuko Mimura

Itsuko Mimura was born in Hyogo Prefecture in 1959 and studied printing at Osaka University of Arts. She held her first solo exhibition at Higashimon Gallery in 1982, followed by numerous solo and group exhibitions centered around galleries in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. In 1985, she released woodblock prints inspired by South American writer Borges simultaneously in Osaka (Amano Gallery) and Tokyo (Gallery Arche). During the same period, she gradually began to shift to painting, releasing drawings on nautical charts, and experimenting with oil painting in works exhibited at “Art Now ’86”. Line drawings, which conveyed the movement of the hand, were the life of the work, and these eventually began to give rise to concrete shapes such as seeds, leaves, and water droplets. The appearance of heavily breathing surfaces in the pictures and the spread of this technique were also significant. In 1991, she formed and presented works with the unit “Kunst Kraft Klub”, made up other graduates of Osaka University of Arts such as Shinnosuke Fukuda. She has continued to release works themed around ‘life energy’ up until the present.