This exhibition takes portraiture and figure painting as its theme, largely drawing on contemporary works from my private collection.
Depictions of the human form can be found in cave paintings of the Stone Age. It seems fair to say that visual art has been accompanied by the image of humanity since its birth. In the twentieth century, movements ranging from abstract to conceptual art began to broaden and diversify artistic expression further. As a longtime collector of contemporary art, I remain astonished by the way artists continue to discover new expressive possibilities in an ancient theme like depicting humanity.
The nature of portraiture and figure painting has changed dramatically, of course. In centuries past, a portrait depicted a specific, existing person, but in contemporary art the human form is treated in much more complex ways.
For example, some artists depict “mediatized figures” of some sort｠to examine our increasingly complicated identities and the intermingling of falsehood and reality in an age filled with countless images circulated through the mass media.
Artists who create their own distinct world with reference to older paintings of the human figure are also of great interest to me.
Their works are themselves a dialogue between past and present.
Alongside contemporary art, this exhibition also features three portraits from the SMBC Collection and some older hanging scrolls from my own collection. These additions make it possible to convey transitions and diversity in depictions of the human form over a longer time axis. The exhibition is divided into three chronologically ordered sections. The first section, after the introduction, contains older portraits and figure painting dating from the eighteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. The second section features artists whose careers began in the 1970s or later, and is centered on works incorporating photography. The third and final section contains works from relatively young artists who first came to widespread notice after the year 2000. Approaches that are very different from realism, yet still based on traditional portrait depictions, are already bearing rich fruit.

Takeo Obayashi