Tomie Ohtake

On View
Nov 4, 2025 – Feb 11, 2026
Tokyo

Pace is pleased to present coinciding exhibitions of work by artists Marina Perez Simão and Tomie Ohtake in Tokyo this fall. On view November 4, 2025, through February 11, 2026, these presentations, installed across the first and second floors of Pace’s Azabudai Hills gallery, will situate new paintings by Simão in dialogue with works produced by Ohtake—a Japanese-Brazilian artist whose inventive abstractions charted new courses for Modernism in Brazil—between 1963 and 2013. Both exhibitions will be on view during Art Week Tokyo 2025, which runs from November 5 to 9.

Pace’s exhibition of painting and sculpture by Ohtake will offer a look at the late artist’s experimental and radical practice, which she developed during an especially rich and exciting period of Brazilian art history in the 20th century. Born in Kyoto in 1913, Ohtake immigrated to Brazil in 1936 and became one of the country’s most celebrated abstractionists. Working across many mediums, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture, the artist brought both formal rigor and an embrace of randomness and surprise to her art. She evoked geological and cosmological phenomena, as well as the vast natural landscapes and topographies of Brazil, through combinations of organic forms and structured geometries in her works. At once ambiguous and multivalent, her abstractions are marked by stately simplicity and freewheeling joy.

The gallery’s focused exhibition of Ohtake’s work will feature eight paintings and a freestanding, painted steel sculpture. The canvases in the show, which date between 1963 and 2004, chronicle the evolution of the artist’s investigations of color, texture, and form. Each composition is a glimpse into some other world—a window into another realm. The 2013 sculpture in the show, a tubular structure that seems to dance before the viewer’s eyes, reflects her uncanny ability to imbue simple forms with a sense of continuous, fluid movement. Installed near Pace Tokyo, at the base of the Ark Hills Sengokuyama Mori Tower, Ohtake’s monumental yellow ribbon-like outdoor sculpture Infinity is a testament to her enduring impact on public art and urban space.

Together, these exhibitions of work by Simão and Ohtake will present an intergenerational conversation between two artists linked by their heritage and their imaginative approaches to abstraction and landscape painting.

Films

Artists on Artists: Marina Perez Simão x Tomie Ohtake

This film from our Artists on Artists series accompanies our coinciding exhibitions of work by Marina Perez Simão and Tomie Ohtake at our Tokyo gallery. Simão, who is presenting her landscape paintings in dialogue with Ohtake's work in Tokyo, speaks about the late Japanese-Brazilian artist's life and legacy. "I love the ambiguity of forms and the vastness of possibilities," Simão says of Ohtake's paintings and sculptures. "There's a mixture of rigor and playfulness."

About the Artist

Tomie Ohtake (b. 1913, Kyoto, Japan; d. 2015, São Paulo, Brazil) moved to Brazil in 1936 and held her first solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 1957. Ohtake has exhibited extensively worldwide and has been included in the São Paulo Biennial in 1961, 1963, 1965, 1968, 1984, 1989, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2012. Important posthumous exhibitions of her work include Tomie Ohtake dançante, Museum of Visual Arts in São Luís do Maranhão (2023); Tomie Ohtake: Visible Persistence, Nara Roesler in New York (2021); the 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Open Ended: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Collection – 1900 to Now, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2024); Cinco Ensaios sobre o MASP - Geometrias, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2025); and Body on the Line: Collection 1950s–1970s, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025). Ohtake’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; M+, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; and Tate, London, among many others