Toshiko okanoue biography books

‘Premonition’ © Toshiko Okanoue, Collection of the Museum of Art, Kochi

Born in Kochi in 1928, Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue cut her teeth at the Bunka Gakuin school in Tokyo.

While studying fashion design, she soon developed a passion for collage, an art in its own right and one which has earnt her worldwide fame.

After the war, in the early 1950s, the artist escaped from the heavy, morose atmosphere by losing herself in Western fashion magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Life.

Instinctively, she began cutting out, gathering and then sticking together body parts and objects of all kinds that she selected with care.

 

An icon of Japanese surrealism

Her art plays with proportion in an unsettling manner that throws her pieces totally off balance, showcasing asymmetric bodies knocking together with animals and various objects.

Toshiko Okanoue thus set foot in the surrealist movement without really realising it.

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