All manner of people and animals and objects residing within me are lined up waiting, eager to be painted. *

The paintings of Genichiro Inokuma (1902–1993) contain a plethora of motifs, starting with people, animals, and other things living and inanimate, all on display in this exhibition encompassing Inokuma’s output from early period, to final years.
From his student days at the Tokyo Fine Arts School (now Tokyo University of the Arts) through his Paris years, Inokuma painted human figures often, though animals feature frequently too. From around 1950, cats join people as a significant motif. Free-spirited felines with their nonchalant disregard for human convenience made a seductive subject for an artist who at times lived with as many as ten of them.
Following his relocation to New York in 1955 Inokuma’s works on canvas grew more abstract in style, however his covers for the magazine Shosetsu Shincho depicted clearly the city’s inhabitants, plus dogs, horses, and other creatures that live alongside humans. Then from 1975 onward, as he split his time between Tokyo and Honolulu, Inokuma’s canvases were dominated by flora and fauna, or bizarre mechanical forms. His final years were marked by a return to the figurative, with people plus creatures such as birds, cats, and dogs sharing the picture plane with other motifs.
Throughout his life Genichiro Inokuma turned his gaze to “all manner of people and animals and objects,” portraying them with great richness of expression. Paintings in which all motifs live and breathe equally show how we too can turn our gaze to the myriad entities, living and otherwise, that share our planet.

*Genichiro Inokuma, “When one goes beyond conventional wisdom,” Guén Inokuma, Mitsukoshi, 1990.