Takeshi Hara

Takeshi Hara (原健, b. 1942, Nagoya) is a Japanese printmaker and painter, best known for STROKES, a series of lithographs of sweeping, overlapping bands of graded colour that he began with a solo exhibition in 1974 and carried into the 1990s. The characters of his name can also be read "Ken Hara", and Western dealers often list him that way. Hara trained as an oil painter at Tokyo University of the Arts (BFA 1967, MFA 1969). Intensive courses there with Tetsurō Komai (etching), Kanzaemon Onaya (lithography) and Tadashige Ono (woodcut) drew him to printmaking, while his paintings of the late 1960s — airbrushed repeats of abstract shapes — owed much to Frank Stella, Morris Louis and Ellsworth Kelly. After graduate school he stayed on as an assistant in the university's printmaking studio and took up lithography in earnest. He is credited with discovering rōrā-bokashi, a roller-blending technique in which the roller itself carries a graded blend of ink, so that a single pass lays down colour shading smoothly from one tone to the next; the thin, even ink film of lithography is what made it possible. His early series GRADUATION, RELATIVITY and NO FOCUS (1969–73) are in the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. He showed at the 7th Paris Biennale in 1971 and won a prize at the 8th Tokyo International Print Biennale in 1972. STROKES takes the swing of the arm as its subject: the stroke of a brush, the sweep of a gesture, a heartbeat. After a 1975–76 Agency for Cultural Affairs fellowship in Britain and the United States, the bands became hard-edged and evenly overlapped, each graded from dark to light so that it reads as a path of light. The rhythm of a calligrapher's brush survives in the shapes, while every trace of the hand is removed from the surface; Jackie Menzies of the Art Gallery of New South Wales called the prints "pristine, dispassionate and self-contained". Each print is titled with its year and a running number, so STROKES 82-15 dates from 1982. Hara also showed at the Bradford International Print Biennale (1979) and the Kraków International Print Triennial (1994). He taught at Tokyo Zokei University from 1973, as professor of painting from 1987, and became professor emeritus in 2008; he also lectured at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1983–87. From the late 1990s he turned to painting with the ASUKA (飛華) series. Moved by gagaku court music, he has written that he dreams of a "gaga" (雅画), an elegant painting to match it. He was still exhibiting in 2025, in a two-person show with Kuniaki Yamamura in Nagoya. His work is held by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the Tokushima Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, the Yokohama Civic Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Abe Publishing issued a monograph of more than 600 works, Takeshi Hara: The Works, in 2026.

1 physical work