Alice Shintani and Tomie Ohtake – Mountain and Valley

CAIXA Cultural Rio de Janeiro – Teatro Nelson Rodrigues 

– Address: Av. República do Paraguai, 230 – Centro RJ  

– Opening Hours: Terça a sexta, das 10h às 19h. Sábados, domingos e feriados, das 11h às 18h

– Free admission

Over the course of its twenty-five-year history, Instituto Tomie Ohtake has organized more than forty exhibitions dedicated to the work of Tomie Ohtake, presented in cities across Brazil and abroad. Today, one of the institute’s central commitments is to revisit Ohtake’s trajectory through the lens of the present, bringing her work closer to artists whose practices allow for fruitful intersections and dialogues.

It is within this framework that the encounter between Tomie Ohtake and Alice Shintani takes shape. Separated by more than five decades, the two artists allow us to perceive how different generations have responded, from within their own historical and cultural contexts, to recurring questions in Brazilian art. On one hand, their paths reflect distinct moments in the Japanese-Brazilian experience and different ways of engaging with Japanese cultural heritage in Brazil. On the other, both have found in painting a field of experimentation, and in abstraction a space of research, each in her own way.

Alice Shintani e Tomie Ohtake – Montanha e vale [Alice Shintani and Tomie Ohtake – Mountain and Valley] takes these convergences and divergences as its point of departure, proposing new readings of both artists’ practices. Central concerns in Alice Shintani’s work—such as systems of circulation, mechanisms of value attribution, and forms of identity construction—offer new perspectives from which to approach Tomie Ohtake’s oeuvre. At the same time, Ohtake’s singular trajectory sheds light on the continuities and transformations that have shaped Brazilian artistic production over the course of more than seven decades.

Among Instituto Tomie Ohtake’s commitments, the touring of exhibitions throughout Brazil has proven essential to a greater circulation of culture and artists across the country. So far, the partnership with CAIXA Cultural has enabled more than ten exhibitions organized by Instituto Tomie Ohtake in cities throughout Brazil. Our return to Rio de Janeiro provides the opportunity to take part in the reopening of the exhibition galleries at Teatro Nelson Rodrigues, an occasion we celebrate together.

We are thankful to the Ministry of Culture, through the Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law), for making Alice Shintani e Tomie Ohtake – Montanha e vale possible. The exhibition is produced by Instituto Tomie Ohtake at CAIXA Cultural, with sponsorship from CAIXA Vida e Previdência; support from CAIXA, CAIXA Seguridade, AkzoNobel, Galeria Nara Roesler, and Galeria Almeida & Dale; and official paint support from Coral. We extend our gratitude to all the lenders who generously made works available for this show.

Instituto Tomie Ohtake

CAIXA Vida e Previdência operates in the Life Insurance, Credit Life Insurance, and Private Pension sectors. Established in 2021, the company is the result of a partnership between CAIXA Seguridade and CNP Assurances. Its products and services are available through both physical and digital channels, including CAIXA’s nationwide service network, which comprises branches, customer service units, lottery outlets, and CAIXA Aqui correspondents.

The company is dedicated to offering protection and pension solutions in compliance with the regulatory and legal frameworks governing the sector.

For more information, visit: www.caixavidaeprevidencia.com.br

Until recently, Brazil was considered a country without mountains. This statement reveals less about the landscape itself than about the ways in which it has been named: for decades, the geological formations of Brazilian territory were excluded by the criteria that defined what could be considered a mountain. More than a question of geomorphology, this revision demonstrates the historical and contingent nature of classification systems. Today, we know that the mountains have always been here.

Recent research has shifted the understanding of landforms away from isolated criteria of origin or form, and toward more relational modes of interpretation. Mountains and valleys do not exist separately: as one rises, the other takes shape; as one erodes, the other develops. Over time, wind, rain, and rivers transport sediments from higher to lower areas, making them mutually constituted forms.

In the art world as well, naming can produce both visibility and erasure. Between Tomie Ohtake and Alice Shintani, it becomes possible to propose less classificatory and prescriptive readings, moving beyond isolated criteria and shifting the ways in which their works are initially recognized.

Working within the field of abstraction, Tomie Ohtake developed a body of work that resisted defined narratives, preserving the openness of aesthetic experience by allowing each viewer to construct their own paths of interpretation. From the 1980s onward, this concern with the encounter expanded into urban space, through public sculptures integrated into the day-to-day life of several Brazilian cities.

For Alice Shintani, this relationship with others unfolds along different paths. Extending beyond the traditional boundaries of painting, her practice takes the form of installations, collective actions, and interventions in urban space. Through an economy of means and the use of simple materials, her work investigates the ways in which images, objects, and people circulate through the spaces of everyday life.

The exhibition occupies the two galleries of CAIXA Cultural – Teatro Nelson Rodrigues, as well as the passageway between them. In the first room, paintings and prints by Tomie Ohtake share the space with Menas, an installation by Alice Shintani. In the second, a painterly installation by Shintani takes the architecture itself as its support, while Ohtake’s tubular sculptures occupy the center of the room. Between the galleries, Shintani’s series Cru e Cozido [Raw and Cooked] establishes a transitional zone, assembling earlier works from her practice, now revisited in light of the questions brought forward by the exhibition.

Rather than bringing two artists together through formal affinities or a shared origin, Alice Shintani e Tomie Ohtake – Montanha e vale [Alice Shintani and Tomie Ohtake – Mountain and Valley] seeks to shift established modes of interpretation, making room for unsettled relationships between their bodies of work. As in the formation of mountains and valleys, it is precisely the distance between them that makes the encounter possible.

Ana Roman and Catalina Bergues

Curators

Alice Shintani and Tomie Ohtake – Mountain and Valley

1. A Country Without Mountains 

For many years, Brazil was considered a country without mountains. Not because mountains did not exist, but because the criteria used to define them failed to recognize them as such. For decades, mountains were understood primarily as landforms produced by recent tectonic folding, such as the Andes or the Himalayas. Since Brazil’s territory consists of much older geological formations, its elevations were classified instead as mountain ranges, plateaus, and escarpments.

More recent research has shown, however, that the identification of mountains depends not only on their geological origin but also on their form. Thus, under revised criteria, mountains have come to be recognized in many regions of the country. The change did not alter the landscape, only the way it is described. The mountains had always been here.

Rather than a question of geomorphology, this revision demonstrates the historical and contingent nature of classification systems. The landforms remain the same, but the instruments through which they are observed change—connecting the recognition of existence to language and to the act of naming.

The formation of mountains is closely linked to that of valleys. As certain blocks of rock are uplifted, others subside; over time, wind, rain, and rivers continue to reshape this relationship, carrying sediments from higher to lower ground. Mountains and valleys are not opposing forms but parts of a single process, each constituting the other.

1. The Valley

Tomie Ohtake and Alice Shintani relate to both their own artistic production and the field of art in very different ways. When Ohtake began her artistic practice in the 1950s, abstraction occupied a central place in the debates surrounding Brazilian modern art. She spent a brief period working in a figurative mode, and within just a few years her painting had already become fully abstract. Associated with ideals of universality, formal autonomy, and aesthetic renewal, abstraction seemed to offer a language capable of transcending biographical or contextual particularities. However, this same paradigm also gave rise to interpretations that read Ohtake’s work through an essentialized notion of Japanese identity, attributing her gestures to a supposedly “Eastern” sensibility, often linked to Zen, calligraphy, or Japanese tradition. Rather, Ohtake’s engagement with abstraction came from a sustained research into color, form, and gesture, underscoring the deliberateness with which she developed her practice. In terms of relating to the audience, abstraction offered Ohtake an openness that interested her. Indeed, she chose to leave virtually all of her works untitled, so as not to delimit the paths along which an artwork could lead. Whenever she was presented with a specific interpretation of her work, her response was simply: “Thank you.” 

This interest in the encounter with others led her, in the 1980s, to begin creating public artworks, sculptures inhabiting the urban fabric, primarily in the state of São Paulo but also in other cities across Brazil and abroad. Through these works, she made explicit the importance she placed on engaging with the public. Art, in her view, should inhabit everyday life and be encountered, even if almost unnoticed, in the course of the day—rather than existing solely within the museum, a space often perceived as distant and inaccessible to many.

For Alice Shintani, this question unfolds along different paths. With a degree in computer engineering and active in the arts since the early 2000s, the artist has developed a practice that extends beyond the conventional boundaries of painting, taking the form of installations, collective actions, and interventions in urban space. Her work is directed less toward the creation of an autonomous object than toward the circumstances in which it appears, circulates, and is shared.

Marked by an economy of means and a playful visual grammar, Shintani’s work seems to invite immediate engagement. Yet this apparent simplicity operates as a strategy of displacement. Folded shapes, fabrics, flags, and lightweight structures are mobilized to investigate the conventions that organize everyday experience, creating frictions between the visible world we consume and what remains invisible in social, economic, and institutional relations.

This dimension became particularly evident between 2013 and 2016, when Shintani worked as a street vendor selling brigadeiros, Brazilian chocolate truffles, in the streets and open-air markets of São Paulo’s financial district. Her close experience of the city’s transformations, as well as the invisible conflicts embedded in social space, became a constitutive element of her practice. It was in this context that Menas emerged, an installation composed of accordion-folded paper, painted and embroidered by hand, mounted on boxes used to package cleaning products and Asian foods. Carefully distributed throughout the space at varying heights and configurations, its elements establish associations among logos, product names, shapes, and regimes of value, inviting the viewer’s gaze to move without any predetermined hierarchy. Lightweight and transportable, the installation can be easily assembled and dismantled, thus incorporating questions related to the commodification of forms and sensibilities in the current stage of the art system—a reflection particularly dear to the artist’s practice.

If Ohtake sought to create works that remained open to interpretation, Shintani constructs pieces that remain open to transformation. In both practices, form never appears as an end in itself, but as a device capable of accommodating chance, movement, and the presence of others. It is here that their trajectories converge: not because they share the same artistic language, but because they understand art as something that always remains incomplete, dependent upon the world in order to come into being.

1. Crossing

Alice Shintani e Tomie Ohtake – Montanha e vale [Alice Shintani and Tomie Ohtake – Mountain and Valley] brings together two artists whose trajectories seem to resist straightforward narratives of continuity. Separated by generations, social contexts, and distinct moments in the history of Brazilian art, Tomie Ohtake and Alice Shintani have developed very different relationships to painting, abstraction, and space. Although both of their histories are shaped by migratory processes that profoundly marked São Paulo’s development during the twentieth century, the exhibition does not take this connection as the basis for a shared identity. Rather, it seeks to explore how different historical experiences produce distinct ways of imagining, inhabiting, and transforming space.

The encounter between the two artists occupies the two galleries of CAIXA Cultural – Teatro Nelson Rodrigues in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the passageway between them. In the first room, paintings and prints by Tomie Ohtake, produced primarily between the 1970s and 1980s, are displayed along the walls. At the far end of the room, a large-scale painting meets a curved wall, reactivating the relationship for which it was originally conceived, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake’s inauguration in 2001. At the center of the gallery stands Menas, Alice Shintani’s installation composed of accordion-folded paper on cardboard boxes. Reconfigured with each assembly, the work introduces a provisional and adaptable logic of occupation, closer to the setup of a market stall than to the stability generally associated with an exhibition space. Between Ohtake’s paintings and Shintani’s installation, a first tension emerges: on one side, surfaces characterized by formal synthesis; on the other, paintings that leave the wall behind and occupy the space, alongside bodies and architecture.

In the passageway connecting the two galleries, the series Cru e Cozido [Raw and Cooked] accompanies the visitor’s movement. Begun in 2013 as studies for an exhibition bringing together Alice Shintani and Tomie Ohtake at Galeria Marcelo Guarnieri in Ribeirão Preto, the works form a polyptych comprising nineteen paintings and one empty frame. Spanning a period of over a decade, shapes, colors, and spatial relationships continually reappear without ever settling into a definitive arrangement. More than a sequence of works, the series functions as a permanent field of experimentation, where images remain in a state of transformation.

In the second room, Shintani’s presence expands. A large-scale painterly installation extends across the walls, turning the architecture into its support and rendering painting, installation, and space inseparable. The work envelops the viewer, producing a particular mode of perception. Through the use of color, form, and scale, the artist unsettles habitual readings of the environment, suggesting other ways of relating to the exhibition’s landscapes.

It is within this context that Tomie Ohtake’s tubular sculptures appear. Produced from the 1990s onward, they derive from studies made with wire, taking concerns that run throughout her career—curve, balance, tension, and movement—and bringing them into three-dimensional space. Inserted in the chromatic field constructed by Shintani, Ohtake’s sculptures emerge not as formal extensions of painting, but as lines of force traversing the space, establishing new relationships between figure and ground, structure and landscape.

More than proposing a dialogue between two artists, Alice Shintani e Tomie Ohtake – Montanha e vale investigates distinct ways of understanding the relationship between painting, space, and experience. In Tomie Ohtake’s work, form tends toward synthesis and concentration; in Alice Shintani’s, toward expansion and displacement. The exhibition does not seek to resolve this distance or turn it into harmony. On the contrary, it takes that distance as its very material. It is within this interval—between containment and dispersion, permanence and transformation—that their bodies of work converge, generating readings that neither could sustain on its own.

Ana Roman and Catalina Bergues

Curators

Tomie Ohtake (1913–2015) was born in Kyoto, Japan, and arrived in São Paulo in 1936. In Brazil, she married Ushio Ohtake, with whom she had two sons, Ruy Ohtake (1938–2021) and Ricardo Ohtake (1942); the couple later separated. She began painting at the age of 39 and, from 1952 onward, developed a practice marked by abstraction and continuous experimentation. Her oil paintings often originated in preparatory cut-outs and collages, which guided the construction of shapes and fields of color. She later adopted acrylic paint, allowing her to explore new relationships of fluidity, transparency, and depth. From the 1970s onward, her practice expanded from painting into printmaking and, in the following decade, into sculpture and large-scale public artworks. She remained active until the end of her life, passing away at the age of 101.

Alice Shintani (1971) was born on the border between Diadema and São Paulo. With a degree in computer engineering, she pursued a career in the field before beginning her artistic path in the early 2000s. Her practice takes painting as an open field of experimentation, expanding into installations, collective actions, interventions in urban space, and exhibition settings. Her works articulate playful and deceptively simple strategies, challenging established modes of circulation, value, and visibility in art, as well as the relationships between artwork, space, and audience. Between 2013 and 2016, she worked as a street vendor selling brigadeiros in the streets and open-air markets of São Paulo’s financial district. This experience became central to her practice and gave rise to developments such as the Mata and Menas series, presented at the 34th São Paulo Biennial – Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing (2020–2021).