Shizuko Yoshikawa

The first monograph on Japanese-born constructive-concrete artist Shizuko Yoshikawa, this work features a major essay by art historian Gabrielle Schaad and a contribution by art history professor Midori Yoshimoto. Highlighting the life and work of one of the first and few Japanese students at the Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung, known as the post-war Bauhaus, the texts are translated into German, English and Japanese.

Schaad tracks the relationship between art and architecture in Yoshikawa’s work, her research on colour studies, printmaking and drawing, and her life and influences living in Switzerland. Following a rich and expansive selection of her artworks, the second essay, titled ‘Building a Room of One’s Own: Challenges of Shizuko Yoshikawa’, contextualises Yoshikawa’s oeuvre within the history of post-war Japanese art, and regarding its intersections with Europe, as well as tracing the different stages of her life (including the challenges she faced from a feminist perspective) and her formative years in ‘discovering her own room’.