Work '63-81 VIVA Tokyo Olympic

Yukihisa Isobe is a Japanese contemporary artist born in 1935 in Tokyo. He graduated from Oil Painting Course of Department of Painting of Tokyo University of the Arts in 1959. His relief with repeated emblems exhibited in the 14th Yomiuri Independent (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum) in 1962 received the wide attention. Isobe’s work was exhibited in The New Japanese Paintings and Sculpture (MoMA) in 1966. Subsequently Isobe moved to New York and then studied ecological planning at the Graduate School of University of Pennsylvania. After returning to Japan in 1974, he spent his time for the environment assessment studies. From 1998 to 2001, he produced works in Paris. Isobe, who has been working in Japan for large-scale projects on the subject of river in recent years, continues to act energetically as a pioneer of environmental art.

Isobe aligned several relief emblems, with some having small images like national flags, across the surface of Work '63-81 VIVA Tokyo Olympic. Repeated emblems in Isobe’s paintings may evoke Pop art, which repeats daily images. Though produced in the age of rising Pop art in the 1960s, his emblem series never bears worldliness of the time of creation.