Artists

Hideko Fukushima was one of the artists who actively participated in Japan's postwar avant-garde art movement. She is also known as the only female member of Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), the interdisciplinary artists' collective active during the 1950s.

Fukushima joined Experimental Workshop in 1951 and became involved in a wide range of activities that extended beyond the production of visual art, including stage and costume design, poetry, and experimental works using automated slide projections.

By the mid-1950s, she had developed a distinctive form of abstraction in which everyday objects were pressed against the pictorial surface and circles and lines were repeated across the composition. The circle, in particular, became an important motif that recurred throughout her subsequent practice. In the early 1960s, she produced the Arc series, characterised by dark, restrained colours, before developing the predominantly blue Blue series in the 1970s. Following these works, in which fresh, luminous blues spread across the entire pictorial surface, she began producing the May Vibration series in the mid-1980s.

In 1957, Fukushima attracted the attention of the French art critic Michel Tapié during his visit to Japan, bringing her work into dialogue with the international context of Art Informel. She subsequently exhibited in Europe, including at the "11th Lissone Prize" in 1959 and the "2nd Paris Biennale" in 1961. In recent years, amid renewed efforts to revise the history of postwar art, Fukushima's practice and works have once again attracted significant attention.