HIRAKAWA Toshio

Native placeKosakai, Aichi, JPN
Birth1924
Dead placeAichi, JPN
Died2006

Biography

Hirakawa, born in Aichi Prefecture, undertook a live-in apprenticeship at a textile design school in Kyoto. During the war, he returned home to work as an agricultural and forestry technician for the Aichi Prefectural Government. After the war, he joined the Shin-Nihonga-kenkyu-kai, or New Japanese-style Painting Study Group, led by Azuma Hekiu, and in 1948 submitted works to the Sozo-bijutsu exhibition, the forerunner of the Japanese-style painting section of the Shinseisaku-kyokai. His “City” was accepted for the Sozo-bijutsu exhibition in 1950. He subsequently received the New Artist’s Prize at Shinseisaku-kyokai exhibitions in 1954, 1958, and 1962. In the early 1950s, Hirakawa showed highly structured paintings with simplified motifs in a Western-style manner. From 1958 on, he began depicting inorganic masses of rock with heavy black outlines. From 1960, he continued to present works featuring trees as organisms. Eventually, he combined incongruous rocks and trees to create a cosmological view of nature previously unseen in Japanese-style painting.

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