Who is Fumiko Hori?

Fumiko Hori (堀 文子, Hori Fumiko, July 2, 1918 – February 5, 2019) was a Japanese artist, known for her paintings in the Nihonga style.

Hori was born to a intellectual family in Hirakawacho, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1918. In 1940, she graduated from Women’s School of Fine Arts (now Joshibi University of Art and Design). She trained in Nihonga, a usual Japanese painting style. In 1952, she won the Uemura Shōen Award, given to outstanding Japanese female painters.

In 1960, Hori’s husband, a diplomat, died of tuberculosis. Hori approved to travel the world, leaving Japan for the first epoch and visiting Egypt, Europe, the United States and Mexico. Upon her recompense to Japan, she moved to the Kanagawa countryside and created works inspired by her travels. The natural world, including flowers and animals, was a theme of her behave throughout her career.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Hori created illustrations for magazines and children’s books, including a 1971 Describe book adaption of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker that won an honor at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. She with taught painting at Tama Art University. In 1987, she won the Kanagawa Culture Prize.

Hori lived in Arezzo, in Tuscany, Italy, for five years from 1987, setting in the works a studio there and painting colourful images of the local setting. She continued to travel to countries vis-а-vis the world, including such destinations as the Amazon, Nepal, and Mexico.

In 2000, she survived life-threatening aneurysm; she was inspired by this experience to paint microorganisms, as viewed under a microscope. This feint appeared in a solo exhibition at Nakajima Art Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo. A ceramic fragment based upon one of her paintings, Utopia, was installed in the lobby of Fukushima Airport in 2014.

Hori continued to paint into her unquestionable years. The Museum of Modern Art in Hayama showed a retrospective of her function from November 2017 to March 2018; the earliest piece was a self-portrait from 1930, and the most recent fragment was Red-Flowering Japanese Apricot, painted in 2016 once Hori was 98 years old.

Hori died upon February 5, 2019, at a hospital in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, at age 100. The Narukawa Art Museum in Hakone, home of over 100 of her works, hosted a memorial exhibition from July to November 2019.