Piazza San Marco

Uemura graduated from Musashino Art School in 1961. People took note of his watercolors elaborating plant-like forms from when he was still a student. He won the third prize at The 3rd Shell Art Award held in 1959. In 1963, he submitted his work to The 3rd Biennale de Paris. In the 1980s, he portrayed upside-down spaces with European cathedrals or master paintings of the past as his motifs.

Everything from the building to the crowd is depicted in detail. Seen as a whole, this picture is composed of a very strange space. The building at the lower left extends towards the depths and the upper part of the picture shows an inverted view. Instead of adhering to a spatial expression seen from a single viewpoint, Uemura connects a building seen from this side and the other side so that it looks as if you are commanding a bird’s-eye view while circling up in the air. To this artist who had consistently been pursuing how to depict space and depth, complex traditional Western architecture like Saint Mark’s Basilica was an ideal motif. The labyrinthine picture is portrayed in tempera, in which powder pigments mixed with egg yolk are applied with a fine brush. This technique which demands perseverance provides all the more subtlety to the elaborate world.