shashasha

The massive “Biru-kei (Building Scenes)” offers a complete collection of all the works of the series created by Japanese painter Shinro Ohtake between 1978 and 2019—830 works in total.
A majority of the works in this series were not based on actually existing scenes: Ohtake painted them based on his memories of various cities (Hong Kong, London, Tokyo and more) as well as various “landscapes with buildings” he had seen and images formed in the depths of his mind.
The creation process of this book includes three years of research during which Ohtake assembled all works belonging to the series. They are presented in the book in chronological order, accompanied by a letterpress print, an afterword by Ohtake himself, a brilliant essay by Kenjiro Hosaka (Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art), a biographic overview of Ohtake’s life, and a detailed table of works which stretches over numerous pages (all available in Japanese and English translation).
“He shows us facades head-on, stropped of ornamentation; rectangles (exteriors) dotted with points (windows); generic shapes in a wide variety of scales, textures, colors, layouts, and techniques. In other words, he plays with variables while keeping buildings as his constant, as he knows they make the perfect subject for painted experimentation.”
− from Kenjiro Hosaka’s essay