Risaburo Kimura

City 86, Abstract Screenprint by Risaburo Kimura

1969

Risaburo Kimura was born in 1924 in Yokosuka City, Japan, and moved to New York City in 1964. Kimura attended Yokohama University and Hosei University, in Tokyo in 1954 where he studied Philosophy. His work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto, Japan). Other venues of premier exhibitions include: the Japanese Art Festival in the Museum of Cherrusky, Paris and in Brazil and Italy; Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan; Biennial of Prints in Tokyo, Japan; Modern Prints of Japan in Brussels, Belgium; Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City; and the Japanese Arts Festival at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Kimura's work is collected in permanent museum collections including: Oklahoma Art Center; Long Island University; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Brooklyn Museum; Kyoto City Hall, Japan; I.B.M. World Trade Corporations Headquarters N.Y.; Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio; National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto Japan; Museo La Tertulia Cali in Colombia, South America; The Bank of America in New York; and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Post- sōsaku hanga (creative print movement) artist and master of serigraph technique, Risaburo Kimura has special affinity for big cities, being born close to Tokyo and later living in New York. In the late 1960s, he started his most important series of prints, "Great Cities of the World" series, with well over 400 different renderings of a big city. All of the cities he represented in this series are fictional, and are reduced to masterly use of several colors, and minimalization of architectural elements. One of his best known series is a suite titled "Great Cities of the World", in which he combined silkscreen and lithograph techniques to render the impressions of twenty great cities in the world. The series took him almost three years to finish because Risaburo Kimura drew and hand cut screens by himself. He passed away in 2014 in New York.