Color Intersection M-II

Shigeo Kubota was born in 1947 in the Nishijin district of Kyoto. He did his post-graduate work at the Kyoto City University of Arts. He was a professor at Seian College of Art and Design from 1973-2003. He became a professor at Osaka Seikei Univeristy in 2003. Kubota exhibited his work extensively in Tokyo and Kyoto during the early 1970s, as well as in Switzerland, where he consistently partook in the Lausanne Biennial until it came to an end in 1995. He has also been included in 50 international group exhibitions in the United States, Australia, Poland, and Mexico. Kubota’s use of color, technique, and material, with which he creates shapes and forms that occupy space in a very personal way, defines his art. He described his work as “the echo of opposites, the harmony of contrast. Humorous and profound, comical with desolate, desolate with beautiful, moving through space and time.” Kubota was greatly influenced by American fiber art during his early career, specifically by artists like Ed Rossbach, Lenore Tawney, Claire Zeisler, and Sheila Hicks—all of whom are part of the Art Institute’s textile collection. In the piece Color Intersection M-ll, which he designed and executed in 1997, the artist introduced a piece dominated by gradations of color that were weft-resist dyed in a very simple composition of folded and twisted bands in plain weave. These bands were subsequently attached to a solid plane made from a sheet of heavy Plexiglas. The 32 elements in this horizontal composition are reminiscent of an accordion. Kubota’s art tends to be three-dimensional but hung on a two-dimensional plane—the wall. Today the artist’s work appears in the following public collections: Museum Bellerieve, Zurich, Switzerland; The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and The Cleveland Museum of Art; as well as a number of prominent private collections in Kyoto.