Contemporary Abstract Prints

Edition of 35, sold unframed. This print is part of the ‘Berkeley:Suite’ series, which includes various layered combinations of McArthur Binion’s 1970s self-portrait, a snapshot of...

"Mickey" is of a matching set with "Mickey" and "Minnie." Set against a vivid blue background and encrusted in glitter, Damien Hirst’s “Mickey” is a playful reimagining of the belo...

** Larger prints are available for purchase. Please feel free to contact us if you're interested. Enchanted by the intricate symphony of nature's rhythms, the alluring dance of urba...

Etching in colors on vélin de Lana Royal paper. Paper Size: 11.93 x 9.81 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, Heart of Darkness, 1992. Publ...

large format abstract photograph of water color clouds and horizon from a series of photographic works capturing the sea blue color palette of the ocean SEASCAPE XVIII Diptych by F...

Werner Bronkhorst, Mockney, 2025 Giclée print on heavyweight 395gsm matte Canson Infinity PhotoArt ProCanvas, made with long-lasting Epson archival inks 43 x 33 cm (16.9 x 13 in) ...

large format photograph of sun reflections on a coral reef water surface, mesmerizing light reflections of glistening sunlight on turquoise aquamarine water surface, an homage to th...

This is the original opening invitation card for Donald Judd: The Last Editions at Brooke Alexander Editions in 1994. The invitation takes the form of a postcard that opens up to rev...

This offset lithograph page from Derrière le Miroir No. 90-91 (1956) features a striking photograph of one of Eduardo Chillida’s outdoor sculptures in Saint-Paul de Vence, a location...

Giclée print on Cotton Smooth Rag Edition of 459 143 x 112 cm (56.3 x 44.1 in) Signed and numbered on the front Mint. Minor imperfections may appear due to the nature of the material...

large format abstract photograph of water color clouds and horizon from a series of photographic works capturing the sea blue color palette of the ocean SEASCAPE XVIII Diptych by F...

Gerhard Richter Seestück (bewölkt), 1969-2023 Hybrid print in five colours on 260g Rives handmade paper 70 x 70 cm unsigned edition of 500 Accompanied by the publisher's certificate...

David Shrigley You are not alone, 2014 Linocut on wove paper 31 x 21 cm (image) 39 x 29 cm (paper) Edition 42 of 100 signed and numbered by the artist published by Schafer Editions ...

Screenprint Edition 102 of 120 83.5 × 70.5 cm (32.9 x 27.8 in) Signed, titled, dated and numbered on front Artwork in excellent condition considering its age. Only visible under stud...

David Shrigley Ignore the Ghosts, 2022 Screenprint in eleven colours with varnish overlay on Somerset Satin Tub Sized 410gsm paper Signed by the artist and numbered, on verso 76 x 56...

Proofed and editioned by Peter Kosowicz at Thumbprint Editions Ltd, London, published by Paragon Press. Edition 2/115 The large-scale pop-art 'Grey Spots' Etching with Aquatint is a...

Tableau, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, number Shinoda's works have been collected by public galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum (all in New York City), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. New York Times Obituary, March 3, 2021 by Margalit Fox, Alex Traub contributed reporting. Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107. Her death was announced by her gallerist in the United States. A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family. Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Ms. Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.” As a painter, Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries. Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brush stroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line. “The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Ms. Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.” Ms. Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago. Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young. Deeply influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Shinoda shunned representation. “If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.” Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Ms. Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf. Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview. Ms. Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Ms. Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father, Raijiro, managed a tobacco plant. Her mother, Joko, was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo. One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Toko’s father, who in turn passed it to Toko. “My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the U.P.I. interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.” She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford. “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Ms. Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Ms. Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery. During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA. In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Ms. Shinoda managed to remain for two years. She met many of the titans of Abstract Expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work. “When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.” During this period, Ms. Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries. Returning to Japan, Ms. Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the Expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.” Among Ms. Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She is the only Japanese artist to be so honored during her lifetime. No immediate family members survive. When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Ms. Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation. “I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.” Works of a Woman's Hand Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. into a chunky white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow. Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, on e of Japans foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting. She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form She wears a blue and white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted). Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meji print. Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray. It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda’s opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Darien, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says,”People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted” But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers,”I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me.” Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The Porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance. Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children:”He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others.” He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity. “I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy,” Shinoda says, The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or woman's writing. Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline, “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. “This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river,” she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. “But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river.” Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing.” The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river.” Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, the feeling, "as she says, of wind blowing softly.” Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers. Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda’s theory in practice. She calls the work “my conception of Japan in visual terms.” A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits a Chinese character gen, which means in the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future. Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it could mean to her career (“a restriction”) and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy:she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.)War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist , who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs. In 1954 Shinoda’s work was included in a group exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, she overcame bureaucratic obstacles to visit the U.S.. Unmarried Japanese women are allowed visas for only three months, patiently applying for two-month extensions, one at a time, Shinoda managed to travel the country for two years. She pulls out a scrapbook from this period. Leafing through it, she suddenly raises a hand and touches her cheek:”How young I looked!” An inspection is called for. The woman in the grainy, yellowing newspaper photograph could easily be the on e sitting in this room. Told this, she nods and smiles. No translation necessary. Her sojourn in the U.S. proved to be crucial in the recognition and development of Shinoda’s art. Celebrities such as actor Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet bought her paintings and spread the good word. She also saw the works of the abstract expressionists, then the rage of the New York City art world, and realized that these Western artists, coming out of an utterly different tradition, were struggling toward the same goal that had obsessed her. Once she was back home, her work slowly made her famous. Although Shinoda has used many materials (fabric, stainless steel, ceramics, cement), brush and ink remain her principal means of expression. She had said, “As long as I am devoted to the creation of new forms, I can draw even with muddy water.” Fortunately, she does not have to. She points with evident pride to her ink stone, a velvety black slab of rock, with an indented basin, that is roughly a foot across and two feet long. It is more than 300 years old. Every working morning, Shinoda pours about a third of a pint of water into it, then selects an ink stick from her extensive collection, some dating back to China’s Ming dynasty. Pressing stick against stone, she begins rubbing. Slowly, the dried ink dissolves in the water and becomes ready for the brush. So two batches of sumi (India ink) are exactly alike; something old, something new. She uses color sparingly. Her clear preference is black and all its gradations. “In some paintings, sumi expresses blue better than blue.” It is time to go downstairs to the living quarters. A niece, divorced and her daughter,10,stay here with Shinoda; the artist who felt forced to renounce family and domesticity at the outset of her career seems welcome to it now. Sake is offered, poured into small cedar boxes and happily accepted. Hold carefully. Drink from a corner. Ambrosial. And just right for the surroundings and the hostess. A conservative renegade; a liberal traditionalist; a woman steeped in the male-dominated conventions that she consistently opposed. Her trail blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s. When she says goodbye, she bows. --by Paul Gray...

Carborundum Etching, artist signed edition 10/30, 60"h x 40" framed under plexiglass. Pierre Marie Brisson French b. 1955 - one of the most talented contemporary artists. Brisson...

DAMIEN HIRST (BORN 1965) Taytu Betul, from 'The Empresses' (H10-5), 2022 signed in pencil on the publisher's label affixed verso, stamp-numbered, laminated giclée print with screenpr...

Diasec-mounted Giclée print on aluminium composite panel Edition of 25 42 x 60 cm (16.5 x 23.6 in) Signed and numbered 20/25 on a label affixed to the back After original ink drawing...

This piece titled "Portal I" is an original piece by Alexis Nutini and is made from a woodcut monoprint mounted on panel. This piece measures 14.5"h x 9.5"w. Born in Mexico City, A...

This is an original exhibition poster for the show titled Observatory Earthwork – Project for Sonsbeek 71, Arnhem, held at the Tate Gallery from April 28 to June 6, 1971. The poster ...

The Easy Dark poster for Julie Mehretu’s exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is a remarkable piece that embodies the energy and complexity of Mehretu’s work. Printed in ...

The Easy Dark poster for Julie Mehretu’s exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is a remarkable piece that embodies the energy and complexity of Mehretu’s work. Printed in ...

Damien Hirst Happiness, from The Secrets, 2024 Laminated giclée print on aluminium composite panel Signed, titled, dated and numbered 247/327 on the authentication label on the back ...

Set of offset lithographs printed on 200g Arctic Volume paper Edition of 250 70 x 50 cm (27.5 x 19.6 in) each Not signed or numbered Mint. Minor imperfections may appear due to the p...

Untitled, Sarayevo Winter Olympic Games 1984, is an etching with aquatint and lithograph in colors realized by Cy Twombly on the occasion of the Winter Olympics Games 1984 in Sarajev...

Tableau, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, number Shinoda's works have been collected by public galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum (all in New York City), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. New York Times Obituary, March 3, 2021 by Margalit Fox, Alex Traub contributed reporting. Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107. Her death was announced by her gallerist in the United States. A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family. Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Ms. Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.” As a painter, Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries. Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brush stroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line. “The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Ms. Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.” Ms. Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago. Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young. Deeply influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Shinoda shunned representation. “If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.” Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Ms. Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf. Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview. Ms. Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Ms. Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father, Raijiro, managed a tobacco plant. Her mother, Joko, was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo. One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Toko’s father, who in turn passed it to Toko. “My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the U.P.I. interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.” She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford. “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Ms. Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Ms. Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery. During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA. In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Ms. Shinoda managed to remain for two years. She met many of the titans of Abstract Expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work. “When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.” During this period, Ms. Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries. Returning to Japan, Ms. Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the Expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.” Among Ms. Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She is the only Japanese artist to be so honored during her lifetime. No immediate family members survive. When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Ms. Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation. “I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.” Works of a Woman's Hand Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. into a chunky white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow. Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, on e of Japans foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting. She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form She wears a blue and white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted). Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meji print. Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray. It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda’s opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Darien, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says,”People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted” But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers,”I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me.” Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The Porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance. Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children:”He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others.” He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity. “I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy,” Shinoda says, The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or woman's writing. Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline, “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. “This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river,” she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. “But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river.” Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing.” The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river.” Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, the feeling, "as she says, of wind blowing softly.” Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers. Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda’s theory in practice. She calls the work “my conception of Japan in visual terms.” A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits a Chinese character gen, which means in the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future. Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it could mean to her career (“a restriction”) and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy:she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.)War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist , who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs. In 1954 Shinoda’s work was included in a group exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, she overcame bureaucratic obstacles to visit the U.S.. Unmarried Japanese women are allowed visas for only three months, patiently applying for two-month extensions, one at a time, Shinoda managed to travel the country for two years. She pulls out a scrapbook from this period. Leafing through it, she suddenly raises a hand and touches her cheek:”How young I looked!” An inspection is called for. The woman in the grainy, yellowing newspaper photograph could easily be the on e sitting in this room. Told this, she nods and smiles. No translation necessary. Her sojourn in the U.S. proved to be crucial in the recognition and development of Shinoda’s art. Celebrities such as actor Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet bought her paintings and spread the good word. She also saw the works of the abstract expressionists, then the rage of the New York City art world, and realized that these Western artists, coming out of an utterly different tradition, were struggling toward the same goal that had obsessed her. Once she was back home, her work slowly made her famous. Although Shinoda has used many materials (fabric, stainless steel, ceramics, cement), brush and ink remain her principal means of expression. She had said, “As long as I am devoted to the creation of new forms, I can draw even with muddy water.” Fortunately, she does not have to. She points with evident pride to her ink stone, a velvety black slab of rock, with an indented basin, that is roughly a foot across and two feet long. It is more than 300 years old. Every working morning, Shinoda pours about a third of a pint of water into it, then selects an ink stick from her extensive collection, some dating back to China’s Ming dynasty. Pressing stick against stone, she begins rubbing. Slowly, the dried ink dissolves in the water and becomes ready for the brush. So two batches of sumi (India ink) are exactly alike; something old, something new. She uses color sparingly. Her clear preference is black and all its gradations. “In some paintings, sumi expresses blue better than blue.” It is time to go downstairs to the living quarters. A niece, divorced and her daughter,10,stay here with Shinoda; the artist who felt forced to renounce family and domesticity at the outset of her career seems welcome to it now. Sake is offered, poured into small cedar boxes and happily accepted. Hold carefully. Drink from a corner. Ambrosial. And just right for the surroundings and the hostess. A conservative renegade; a liberal traditionalist; a woman steeped in the male-dominated conventions that she consistently opposed. Her trail blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s. When she says goodbye, she bows. --by Paul Gray...

This piece titled "Portalito" is an original piece by Alexis Nutini and is made from a woodcut monoprint mounted on panel. This piece measures 7.25"h x 9.5"w. Born in Mexico City, ...

Donald Sultan's 'Seven Silvers Jan. 24, 2024' is a masterful color silkscreen featuring enamel inks, flocking, and tar-like textures, limited to an edition of 30. Donald Sułtan Seve...

** Larger prints are available for purchase. Please feel free to contact us if you're interested. Enchanted by the intricate symphony of nature's rhythms, the alluring dance of urba...

Through The Ages by Toko Shinoda, black and white signed lithograph calligraphy 11/35 obituary published by CNN March 2021 Celebra...

Giclée on Somerset Photosatin paper with deckled edges Edition of 100 53.3 x 43 cm (21.1 x 17 in) Signed and numbered Mint, as issued. Sold with accompanying book 

LA Parking by Frank Schott a burst of red in an urban landscape of striking minimalism, from a series of photographs capturing the mid century modern architecture and architectural e...

This series of cyanotype triptychs showcases the beauty of nature scenes, including stunning beaches and oceans, as well as the intricate textures of water, forests, and skies. These...

large scale photograph capturing the soothing tones of nature's calming blue hour color palette Seascape I by Frank Schott 48 x 64 inches / 122cm x 162cm signed edition of 7 30 x 40 inches / 76cm x 102cm signed edition of 25 archival fine art pigment print signed & numbered by artist on certificate label ------------------------- Frank Schott grew up in Germany and attended the prestigious Academy of Arts in Cologne, studying under Professor Arno Jansen, who was an early influence. Moving to California in 1998, Schott's work has evolved to include the epic landscapes and deserts of the American West as well as architectural, conceptual and more formal environments from both home and his travels. Influenced by a number of photographic peers and precursors such as Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, William Eggleston and Joel Sternfeld, Schott's images successfully blend technical, conceptual and formal rigor with a decisive sense of composition and color. Schott's images have an iconic sensibility and give us a bird's eye view onto humanity and its constructs. The specific is edged towards the abstract, often revealing the compelling and disjunctive moment where nature meets man. Frank Schott was born in Cologne, Germany in 1962. He currently lives and works in San Francisco. _________________________ Edition EKTAlux publishes an evolving curated selection of collectable large-scale photography in strictly limited editions, working closely with each artist to guarantee state-of-the-art museum level print and framing quality. Custom / larger print sizes available on request Images can be printed with white border ( 2in L prints / 4in XL prints )

Damien Hirst, The Currency Unique Prints H11-743, 2022 Archival Quality Giclée Reproduction on Heavy Weight Enhanced Matte Professional Stock 100 x 150 cm (39.37 x 59.05 in) Hand...

Vintage poster realized after Piero Dorazio in occasion of the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo in 1984. Offset print. Good condition.

One screen print in colors on wove paper, 2009, signed in pencil, dated and numbered, Edition of 117 (total edition includes 18 artist's proofs), image: 769 by 769 mm 30 1/4 by 30 1/...

In this contemporary encaustic monotype, layers of pigmented beeswax on lightweight paper create an undulating composition suggesting layers of the earth's crust and geological forma...

Justin Pollmann "Day by Daybed" 2023 Inkjet Transfer Collage, Monotype 25"x27.5" inches The inkjet transfer images are made by collaging transfers of inkjet prints to the paper’s ...

Damien Hirst H13-5 Exmouth Esplanade, 2023 Laminated Giclée print on aluminium composite panel. Hand-signed on the label and numbered. This artwork can be hung any way up. 90 x 90 xm...

mesmerizing light reflections of glistening sunlight on turquoise aquamarine water surface, an homage to the iconic pool reflections paintings by artist David Hockney 40 x 32 inches...

Etching Edition of 60 58 x 71 cm (22.8 x 28 in) Signed, numbered and dated Condition Upon Request

Offset lithograph Edition of 300 71 x 71 cm (28.1 x 28.1 in) Signed and numbered on the front Mint

David Shrigley The World, 2021 Screenprint in eight colours with a varnish overlay on Somerset Satin Tub sized 410 gsm paper hand-signed by the artist and numbered, on the back of th...

large scale photograph capturing the soothing tones of nature's calming blue hour color palette Seascape I by Frank Schott 48 x 64 inches / 122cm x 162cm signed edition of 7 30 x 40 inches / 76cm x 102cm signed edition of 25 archival fine art pigment print signed & numbered by artist on certificate label ------------------------- Frank Schott grew up in Germany and attended the prestigious Academy of Arts in Cologne, studying under Professor Arno Jansen, who was an early influence. Moving to California in 1998, Schott's work has evolved to include the epic landscapes and deserts of the American West as well as architectural, conceptual and more formal environments from both home and his travels. Influenced by a number of photographic peers and precursors such as Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, William Eggleston and Joel Sternfeld, Schott's images successfully blend technical, conceptual and formal rigor with a decisive sense of composition and color. Schott's images have an iconic sensibility and give us a bird's eye view onto humanity and its constructs. The specific is edged towards the abstract, often revealing the compelling and disjunctive moment where nature meets man. Frank Schott was born in Cologne, Germany in 1962. He currently lives and works in San Francisco. _________________________ Edition EKTAlux publishes an evolving curated selection of collectable large-scale photography in strictly limited editions, working closely with each artist to guarantee state-of-the-art museum level print and framing quality. Custom / larger print sizes available on request Images can be printed with white border ( 2in L prints / 4in XL prints )

This piece titled "Portal I" is an original piece by Alexis Nutini and is made from a woodcut monoprint mounted on panel. This piece measures 14.5"h x 9.5"w. Born in Mexico City, A...

Edition of 30, sold unframed. This print is part of the ‘Berkeley:Suite’ series, which includes various layered combinations of McArthur Binion’s 1970s self-portrait, a snapshot of...

Theodore Waddell Osage Sheep State II Year: 1994 Color Lithograph Edition: 30 Papers: Arches Cover, Black Paper Size: 22.5 x 30 inches Image Size: Same Signed and numbered by hand CO...

Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) BRONX COMMUNITY COLLEGE THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Specially commissioned art poster designed in 1992 by Elizabeth Catlett, printed in 4-color of...

large scale photograph of sunny cactus landscape, from a series of highly detailed large format nature observations, an homage to the photo realistic ...

RECITALS is mixed media limited edition print by the renowned African American artist Sam Gilliam, created using Archival Inkjet, Relief, and Stencil techniques. This vertical, rainb...

Peter Beard The End of the Game (Hand Signed by Peter Beard), 1977 Offset Lithograph Poster (hand signed by Peter Beard and inscribed with a heart) Han...

Pahlik Mana (Butterfly Maiden) Dan Namingha Hopi kachina katsina black and white unframed limited edition hand pulled lithograph at Tamarind Institue Glenn Green Galleries also pre...

This abstract landscape limited edition print captures a forest in cool blue tones accented by warm yellow-greens and reds. It is an edition size of 100. Printed on canvas, this gicl...

Brice Marden Distant Muses 2000 Screenprint 23 1/2 x 19 1/8 inches; 60 x 49 cm Edition of 300 Signed, dated, and numbered in graphite (lower recto) Frame available upon request Available from Matthew Marks...

large scale photography of mesmerizing color compositions of liquid cloudscape painting in water, hypnotizing abstract liquidscapes from the bo...

Rippling, limited edition lithograph, Japanese, black, white, red, signed,number

Francisco Castro Leñero (Mexico, 1954) "Haz del Viento / Bco / Azul/" from serie "El exilio de los sentidos", 2004 Engraving, aquatint on paper...

Screenprint in 11 colours on paper Edition of 125 Signed, numbered, dated and titled on the front Condition on request Images of edition numbering are for illustrative purposes only....

The Empresses: Theodora (H10-3 ) Laminated Giclée print on aluminum composite, screen printed with glitter. Limited Edition: Edition Number 154/3315 Artwork dimensions: 100 x 100 cm ...

The Empresses: Taytu Betul (H10-5 ) Laminated Giclée print on aluminum composite, screen printed with glitter. Limited Edition: Edition Number 157/2814 Artwork dimensions: 100 x 100 ...

The vertical Spots 'Gly-Gly-Ala' by Damien Hirst is a multi-color woodcut in his signature palette formed with series unique colors. This exquisite piece is created in a limited edit...

Please bear in mind that all prints are produced to order. Lead times are expected between 15-20 days. Giclée print on Archival Matte Paper with Archival Pigment Ink. In 2017 she w...

Edition of 300. Murakami signed and numbered in silver marker pen along the lower right edge. Offset lithograph with cold foil stamp and high gloss varnishing on UV paper. 70 x 52.8 ...

Untitled 1 Etching original painting Plate, Iron 100x70 cm Jaume Plensa Suñé (Barcelona, 1955) is a Spanish plastic artist, sculptor and engraver. Very versatile artist who has also ...

This is a super rare and imaginative print - LAST ONE - from the edition of only 10  (TEN) - and it makes an amazing gift!  Paul Leibow Coffee + Cigarettes, 2019 Lithograph on Newspr...

mesmerizing light reflections of glistening sunlight on turquoise aquamarine water surface, an homage to the iconic pool reflections paintings by artist David Hockney H2O by Erik Pa...

The Empresses: Theodora (H10-3 ) Laminated Giclée print on aluminum composite, screen printed with glitter. Limited Edition: Edition Number 154/3315 Artwork dimensions: 100 x 100 cm ...

Renowned contemporary conceptual African American artist Glenn Ligon Black Rage (back cover), 2019 Silkscreen and digital print Accompanied by an official Certificate of Authenticity...

’Pulpit rock and cockatoos’ By Arthur Boyd Medium - Lithograph Signed - Yes Edition - Artists Proof Size - 840mm x 610mm Date - c1990 Condition - 9 Colour of print may not be accurate when viewed on a monitor. Hand drawn metal plate lithograph printed with Senefelder press on rag paper. Being sold from the Andrew Purches collection. Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd AC OBE (24 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was a leading Australian painter...

Cyd Fontaine (Lausanne, 1992) is a contemporary artist renowned for her captivating use of dreamy atmospheric gradients, which has helped her carve a distinctive niche in the world of digital art. Drawing inspiration from the ethereal beauty of nature, Fontaine's artistic journey has taken her on an imaginative exploration of space, depth, and emotion through the medium of large digital prints. Her signature style is characterized by the use of vast, immersive gradients that seem to stretch infinitely across space. These gradients evoke a sense of enigmatic calmness, inviting viewers to lose themselves in the expanse of her visual landscapes. Her ability to create a feeling of boundless depth and space within her pieces, combined with subtle minimalist compositions, is a testament to her mastery of the digital medium. Fontaine’s pieces resonate with audiences seeking a connection to the sublime, offering a window into a world where colors blend seamlessly and boundaries dissolve. Her work can be found in several private collections throughout Europe and the United States. She currently lives and works between Barcelona and Lausanne. Details: Title: Dawn from an Airplane...