NEW YORK, NY.- Thomsen Gallery is presenting its second online viewing room, dedicated to paintings by Minol Araki (1928-2010), whose works the gallery exhibited in its New York gallery in 2012 and 2015.

 
Minol Araki: Nature in Ink presents mature paintings by an artist who was devoted to creating art for its own sake. Araki, by profession an industrial designer, rarely exhibited during his lifetime and was an unusual twentieth-century adherent to the Chinese and Japanese literati tradition which regarded artists as intellectuals. The exhibition presents 25 paintings of elements of nature, showing Araki’s masterful use of ink and his influences from China, Japan and the West.





Minol Araki was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1928 to Japanese parents. As a child in China, he trained in traditional Chinese painting, but he turned his attention to graphic and industrial design after he was repatriated to Japan at the end of World War II. In Tokyo in the 1950s and early 60s, he studied with Japan’s leading modernist designers and associated with the postwar Tokyo avant-garde. A successful designer, Araki went on to establish a network of design studios in the 1960s, work that took him to cities throughout Asia and North America. In his forties, he first met and took as his painting mentor Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), considered the preeminent Chinese traditionalist painter of the modern age. Araki’s creative zenith came after Zhang’s death in 1983; over the following decade he created five monumental paintings that both demonstrate his mastery of Zhang’s trademark techniques and signal a shift toward modern Japanese painting techniques, an interest explored most fully in the last decade of his life. Araki’s work was exhibited at galleries in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Santa Fe, and New York, and in a traveling exhibition at the National Museum of History in Taipei, Taiwan, and the Phoenix Art Museum in 1999.


Araki's works are in the permanent collections of 19 museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.


Public Collections Include: Art Institute of Chicago, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Hanford CA, Cleveland Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Morikami Museum, Delray Beach FL, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Museum of History, Taipei, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, San Antonio Art Museum, USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena CA, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT.