TOSHIO SHIBATA
Japanese
| TOSHIO SHIBATA: Biography
b. 1949, Tokyo Landscape photographer Toshio Shibata (Japan, 1949) trained the at University of Arts of Tokyo as a painter and print maker. He continued his studies in Europe at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (Belgium) where he essentially became a chiaroscuro painter with a lens, creating geological mappings, civil engineering records and a narrative primarily of the Japanese landscape in continuous transition. The work is filled with abstract geometric patterns, anthropomorphic rock formations, and man-made waterfalls, part of his chronicles of Japanese regional development and landscape architecture. People are nearly always absent in his images and serving only occasionally to emphasize scale, social anomie and the paradoxical emptiness of the landscape of this overcrowded country.The cultural effects of dams, of cement and sandbags, water falling over manufactured precipices or channeled between cement steps, highways carved out stone and excavations shored up by geometric grids rendered in a vast range of black, gray and white result in moody narrative pieces. The same images form the basis of his colored work which even more often verges on abstraction. His work is exhibited internationally, and is in the permanent collection of museums around the world. He has received numerous awards including Kimura Ihei award and is the subject of several monographs. Books and Publications
TOSHIO SHIBATA: Books and Publications on Tepper Takayama Fine Arts
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