Shizuko Yoshikawa | Omuta | Japan | 1934-2019
Shizuko Yoshikawa, born in 1934, left Japan in 1961 to become the only female and one of few Japanese students at the famed Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm in Germany, known as the postwar “Bauhaus.” She later married the renowned designer Josef Muller-Brockmann (1914-1996), a pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design, and moved to Switzerland, where she became an artist and a member of Zurich Concretes, the second generation of concrete art. Amongst the very few women belonging to this art movement, she takes a special position due to her Japanese origins and education. Her work combines the rational concepts of European modern art with the poetry and ease of the intuitional Japanese Zen tradition.