Kimiyo Mishima was born in 1932 in Osaka, and began painting in her teens. In 1986, she received an Asian Cultural Council scholarship and lived and worked in New York for a year. Responding to the significant movements in the 1950s - 1960s, such as Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Mishima established her own style and invoked techniques such as collage and repetitive imagery to create signature works.
Her paintings produced in the 1960s began a process which led to ceramic works, which she began to create after 1971, using printed matter such as newspapers, magazines and advertising flyers which Mishima then transferred onto the works with a silkscreen process. The works reveals the artist’s fear and anxiety towards an overly informational society through her use of appropriated repeated lettering and imagery of the human body and the tense relationship she finds between painting and material. With a sense of ironic humor, Mishima’s ceramic work symbolizes a materialized process in which information obtains a form, and how the object that accompanies it is destined to become waste material.
Major solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Art Factory Jonanjima, Tokyo (2015); “Painting Period 1954-1970,” Gallery Yamaki Fine Art, Hyogo (2013); Gallery Nii, Tokyo (2004); Contemporary Art Museum, Ise, Mie (2004) and Minami Gallery, Tokyo (1974). Her works are included in the permanent collections of Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Kagawa; The Everson Museum of Art, New York; The First National Bank of Chicago; The Korean Culture & Arts Foundation Seoul; The Museum of Art Olot, Spain; The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; The National Museum of Art, Osaka and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.
