Hideki Kimura

Hideki Kimura (born 1948, Kyoto) is a Japanese printmaker and Professor Emeritus of Printmaking at Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA). His career, spanning more than five decades, has been organized around two distinct projects: a sustained body of monotype prints made by squeegeeing acrylic onto glass — a technique he developed to investigate translucence and opacity — and the founding of MAXI GRAPHICA, the artists' group that organizes much of the contemporary print activity in the Kansai region.

Kimura completed his postgraduate studies in Western painting at KCUA in 1974 and immediately began collecting major competition recognitions: in his graduation year he received the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto Award at the 9th Tokyo International Print Biennale; in 1976 he won the Acquisition Prize at the 5th British International Print Biennale and a Medal Prize at the 6th Krakow International Print Biennale; in 1977 he received the Print Art Prize at the 1st Japan Contemporary Print Grand Exhibition; and in 1980 the Polish Photography Association Prize at the 8th Krakow Biennale. The pattern continued through the 1980s — Bilbao 1982 (Second Place), 16th Mainichi Contemporary Japanese Art Hyogo Prefectural Museum Prize (1983), Kyoten Award (1985), 9th British International Print Biennale National Westminster Bank Prize (1986), and 11th Krakow Medal Prize (1986). Few Japanese printmakers of his generation accumulated comparable competition success in the same window.

In 1988 Kimura moved to the United States, where he undertook independent research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts. He returned to Japan in 1995 and rejoined KCUA, eventually becoming Professor of Printmaking — a position he held until his retirement in April 2014. The acrylic-on-glass monotype practice he pursued through this period is the technical signature of his mature work: applied acrylic, squeegeed across plate glass, transferred under pressure to paper, and produced as one-of-one impressions in which the painterly gesture and the printed transfer act on each other simultaneously. The Misty Dutch series, which he developed in his 60s, takes the abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian as a starting point and reads them through this softer, optically diffuse monotype register.

Kimura founded MAXI GRAPHICA, an artists' organization based in the Kansai region that has run print shows and educational events since the early 2000s. He served as President of the Committee of Art for Print Studies in Japan, the leading academic body for printmaking research and teaching coordination, and has been active in international print exhibitions as both artist and curator.

His prints are held by the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto, the Osaka Prefectural Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the British Museum (London), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Art Warsaw, among others. His exhibition record includes the Tokyo International Print Biennale, the British International Print Biennale (Bradford), the Krakow International Print Biennale (Poland), and the Contemporary Japanese Prints exhibition in Ferrara (Italy).