Imperfect Geometry
Project Description
Imperfect Geometry is a solo exhibition by Japanese-Brazilian painter and sculptor Tomie Ohtake (1913–2015), presented by White Rainbow. Celebrated as a major figure in Brazil but historically under-recognised in Europe, the exhibition marked Ohtake’s first solo presentation in the UK in more than 20 years.
Ohtake moved from her native Kyoto to São Paulo in 1936, where she lived and worked until her death at the age of 101. She began her artistic career at the age of 37 as a member of the Seibi group, an association of artists of Japanese descent. Initially working in painting, she developed an increasingly abstract practice that later expanded into printmaking and sculpture.
A leading proponent of an informal, gestural and lyrical approach to abstraction, Ohtake gradually moved away from the dominant geometric tendencies of Brazilian modernism. Although closely connected to artists and critics including Mira Schendel, Willys de Castro and Mário Pedrosa, she developed an independent visual language informed by both Zen Buddhism and Western phenomenology. Throughout her career, she resisted metaphor and fixed reference, instead placing emphasis on the processes of making and experiencing the work.
In the later decades of her career, Ohtake realised a series of ambitious public sculptures across Brazil and Japan. Alongside these monumental works, she developed smaller line-based sculptures whose sinuous forms appear suspended between movement and repose. Between 2013 and 2015, she also produced a series of monochrome paintings, applying thick layers of paint to create dense surfaces articulated by lines, shadows and subtle variations of light.
Imperfect Geometry brought these late monochrome paintings into dialogue with Ohtake’s line sculptures, none of which had previously been exhibited in Europe. By placing the two bodies of work alongside one another, the exhibition highlighted the continuity between Ohtake’s two- and three-dimensional practices and her sustained exploration of line, shadow, light, movement and space.
The exhibition also offered a new perspective on Ohtake’s practice, extending beyond the established narratives surrounding her painting to consider the relationship between her sculptural and painterly languages. Through this dialogue, Imperfect Geometry revealed how abstraction for Ohtake was not a fixed geometric system but an open, physical and perceptual process.
Bio
Tomie Ohtake (1913–2015) was a Japanese-Brazilian artist whose practice encompassed painting, printmaking and sculpture. Born in Kyoto, she moved to São Paulo in 1936 and became one of the most significant figures in Brazilian abstraction. Her work developed through a sustained engagement with gesture, line, colour, light and spatial perception, informed by both Japanese and Western traditions.
Ohtake exhibited extensively in Brazil and internationally, including at the São Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennale and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Posthumous presentations include Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70 at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023), the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), Open Ended: SFMOMA’s Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2024), and a solo presentation at Pace Gallery, Tokyo (2025–26).
Project Details
Year: 2016
Artist: Tomie Ohtake
Exhibition: Imperfect Geometry
Presented by: White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London
Format: Solo exhibition
Works: Painting and sculpture
Location: United Kingdom