Profile

Hisako Kobayashi has been showing her art for the past three decades on five continents. As an abstract painter, her art combines the influences of a person who still feels a strong affinity for her native Japan, but who also received rigorous training in the US, and who has lived in this country for most of her adult life.

Art critic Donald Kuspit has written of her work: "Kobayashi's paintings exemplify the romantic idea that 'it is by feeling alone that art is to be understood,' as Baudelaire has written. Her work is also grounded in the idea that painting should model itself on music, the purest of all the arts. Kobayashi's music is subtle and complex. The abstract language of color and gesture seem indistinguishable, giving the paintings an uncanny presence. The colors insinuate themselves into each other even as they retain their separateness. Her work speaks to Kandinsky's concern for an art of feeling that causes the soul to 'vibrate.'"

Hisako grew up in Tokyo before moving to New York City in 1981 to earn a Masters of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute. The mother of two grown children, she lives with her husband in an artist's loft in downtown Manhattan.