Untitled

Born in 1949 in Aichi Prefecture, Tomiyasu Yamamoto is a Japanese contemporary artist who has been active since the 1970s. After finishing the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Aichi University of the Arts, he was amused by the beauty of ancient Greek architecture he encountered in his trip to Europe, which subsequently influenced him to introduce architectural elements in his paintings. While Yamamoto produced relief pictures in the 1970s, he started to create architectural three-dimensional works transcending the concept of paintings from the middle of 1980s. Yamamoto’s works have been exhibited at a number of solo and group shows at galleries and museums in Japan as well as in international shows, including Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties held at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other museums in 1989. To this day, Yamamoto is active in both Japan and abroad.

As seen in Untitled, most notable distinctiveness in Yamamoto’s art is spotty paint with colors sprayed like splashes. Layers of colors limited to red, gold, green, blue, white, and black are extremely bright. The symmetrical structure employed on the horizontal board of Untitled gives a sublime impression as found in altarpiece.