Nobuya Abe

Nobuya Abe was born on 4 February 1913 in Niigata, Japan. Self-taught, he left secondary school to devote himself to painting and made his debut in the early 1930s, taking part in various group exhibitions. From 1936 to 1938 he travelled through Korea, northern China, Manchuria and Mongolia studying oriental art. In 1937 he published Yōsei no kyori (The Distance of Fairies) with the poet and critic Shūzō Takiguchi, a collection of twelve poems and twelve drawings that brought him to the attention of the avant-garde; in the same years he also worked in experimental photography. From 1939 to 1942 and from 1947 to 1953 he exhibited with the Bijutsu Bunka Kyōkai (Art and Culture Association), the group that brought together the Japanese surrealists. Two tendencies coexisted within it: one linked to surrealism, exploring the deepest layers of the psyche, and the other, to which Abe belonged, oriented towards organic abstraction.

In 1949 he joined the Executive Committee of the Japanese Artists’ Association and organised Japan’s participation in the Second International Art Exhibition in New Delhi (1953). He took part in the first São Paulo Bienal (1951) and in 1952, 1964 and 1976 the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and served on the juries of the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Bienal and the Guggenheim International Award in New York. In 1957 he joined the Executive Committee of the International Association of Plastic Arts, for which he travelled until 1962 across Europe, India, Pakistan and Israel; in 1958 he visited the United States on a State Department grant. After several solo exhibitions, including those at the Yoseido Gallery in Tokyo and the Galleria del Grattacielo in Milan (1960), he settled in Italy, in Rome.

In constant contact with the European and Milanese art scene, where artists such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni were working, his presence in Italy became a meeting point between the avant-gardes of the time, such as Spatialism and the Zero group, and those coming from Japan. He exhibited at the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice and the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, and in 1965 took part in Zero Avantgarde. In 1962 he created murals for the Ente Nazionale per le Biblioteche Popolari e Scolastiche in Rome.

In 1966 he was one of the 46 artists in The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an exhibition shown in eight American museums between 1965 and 1967. In 1967 he brought together a group of six artists who shared his idea of colour as light, presented in the exhibition L’Illumination at the Galleria d’Arte L’Argentario in Trento. He died in Rome in May 1971. Retrospectives were devoted to him in Japan in 2000–2001 and 2018.

© Galleria del Naviglio, Milano