Nobuo Sekine
Born in Saitama, Japan in 1942. After graduated with M.F.A. in Painting from Tama Art University in 1968, he started his career as a main artist of “Mono-ha” movement, which swept the art world from the 1960s to the 1970s.In the same year, Sekine presented “Phase—Mother Earth” in Kobe, which marks the beginning of “Mono-ha” movement and it is evaluated as a monumental piece of postwar Japanese art. A series of painting “Phase of Nothingness” was chosen for the Venice Biennale in 1970 and a numbers of solo exhibitions were held subsequently in Europe.
Sekine established Environmental Art Studios, a public art agency in 1973 to produce landscapes and monuments for public spaces, and phase paintings. Solo exhibitions were held internationally since 1969, including the one at Kawagoe City Art Museum in 2003. Major group exhibition in recent years are the Busan Biennale (Korea), 2002; “A Secret of History of Clay,” the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 2004; “Mono-ha, Reconsidered”, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2005; “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde”, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012. In the Same year, Sekine attracted more attention in the United States, when his artworks were introduced in the exhibition “Requiem for the Sun: Mono-ha Art”, which was the first exhibition in North America that examined “Mono-ha”. Many of Sekine’s works are included in museum collections in many countries. He migrated to Los Angeles, where he continued to produce works until just before his passing in 2019.
Collection
Hakone Open-Air Museum, Hakone, Japan
Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Hiroshima Contemporary Art Museum, Hiroshima, Japan
Kawagoe City Art Museum, Saitama, Japan
Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagaoka, Japan
National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan
Prefectural Museum, Gunma, Japan
Prefectural Museum, Omiya, Saitama, Japan
Prefectural Museum, Tochigi, Japan
Seibu Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Takamatsu Museum of Art, Kagawa, Japan
Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Japan
Yokohama Business Park, Yokohama, Japan
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea
Sonja Henie-Nils Onstad Culture Center, Oslo, Norway
Louisiana Museum, Denmark
Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Amsterdam, Holland
Rijksmuseum Kroller, Otterlo, Holland