SHICHIRO KOBAYASHI: DRAMA OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

The Nippon Gallery, located on the 7th floor in the Nippon Club tower, will present SHICHIRO KOBAYASHI: DRAMA OF LIGHT AND SHADOW with paintings and anime background drawings commemorating Shichiro Kobayashi (1932-2022), a leading animation artist active since the early days of TV animation, who continued to work as a painter until his death on August 25, 2022, at the age of 89. It has long been Kobayashi’s dream to hold a solo exhibition in New York. We will introduce the world of Shichiro Kobayashi, who lived a life of animation history and had a great influence on creators and animation enthusiasts in Japan and abroad, and who continued – upon closing his anime production in 2011 – to pursue his own aesthetics of nature and unlimitedness through figurative and abstract paintings.

In 1964 at the very beginning of Japan’s animation history, Shichiro Kobayashi created background art for four chapters of the TV animation Space Patrol Hopper. Kobayashi recalls at the time he was hired as an illustrator for animation by Toei Doga at the age of 31, “I thought my life would be heaven because I was able to make my living by doing what I love.”

Since then, he painted, created, and directed art for numerous significant Japanese cartoons for 46 years until 2011. His achievements have had great worldwide recognition. In 2011, he received the prize of The Bunka-cho Film Award from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan. In 2015 and 2017, he threw lectures at the Japan Expo in Paris. Later, The Louvre Lens Museum and Pollux Animation invited him to France to present his works, giving a lecture and workshop in 2016, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Kuwait invited Kobayashi in 2018 to hold a lecture and workshop there as well.

The exhibition is curated by Kyoko Sato, who is known for her work in introducing Japanese culture to the New York audience.