Hiroshi Shimura

Hiroshi Shimura (born 1949, Tokyo) is a Japanese-born printmaker who has worked from Cambridge, England, since the late 1970s, best known for richly colored serigraph editions of meadows, woods, and horizons rendered with metallic copper, bronze, gold, and silver inks. His work bridges the cool postwar tradition of Japanese silkscreen — clean flat color separations, lyrical landscapes, repeated motifs — with the British school of contemporary serigraphy in which metallic foils and atmospheric tonal gradients have been a defining technical interest.

Shimura completed his secondary education at Tokyo Metropolitan Sumida River High School before entering Tokyo University of Education (the predecessor of the University of Tsukuba) to study art, specializing in composition. He continued at the same institution for a master's degree in art and graduated into a generation of Japanese printmakers looking to Europe for postgraduate training. In 1975 he relocated to England as a student, enrolling at Cambridge College of Arts (then operating under a slightly different name), where he studied through 1978. He received artist residency status in the United Kingdom in 1978 and was granted permanent UK residency in 1982. He has lived and worked in Cambridge ever since.

His main medium is silkscreen printmaking, and his recognizable image type pairs simplified horizontal landscape elements — a band of meadow, a rim of trees, a distant horizon, a moon over fields — with broad tonal washes screened through fine layers of pigment and metallic ink. Series titles such as Bronze Fantasy, Copper Fantasy, Gold Forest, Silver Forest Breeze, Evening Fantasia Gold, Gold Frosty Evening, and Midnight Concerto signal the centrality of metallic ink to his practice; the metallic layer changes optically as the viewer moves, producing the slow shift of light across the printed surface that Shimura associates with the English landscape and seasons. Other recurring titles in his catalog — Meadow Trio, Daffodils Symphony, Forest Haze, Gentle Tide, Minty Horizon, Mist Fantasy — extend the same lyrical-landscape vocabulary to the rural scenery of Cambridgeshire and East Anglia.

In parallel with his fine-art editions, Shimura has worked as a freelance creative producer in still and moving image, including video essays and photo-essay series. He received a Gold Award at the Bristol International Photography Exhibition, evidence of a continuing engagement with photographic subject matter alongside his print practice. In 1980, while still establishing himself in England, his Cambridge solo exhibition was visited by an Edinburgh public official — a notable early sign of UK institutional interest in his work.

Shimura has maintained a long association with Gallery Tanabe, a Kanagawa Prefecture dealer that has handled Japanese contemporary printmakers for almost four decades and where his bronze and gold serigraphs are a continuous presence. His prints also appear in the rosters of Hanga Ten and other specialist Japanese-print dealers in the U.S. and Europe.

The wider arc of Shimura's career places him in a small group of Japanese-born printmakers — alongside artists such as Mikio Watanabe and Emiko Aida — who completed their primary training in Japan, settled permanently in Western Europe or the U.K., and built print practices that fold European technical traditions back onto a Japanese sensibility. In Shimura's case the integration runs through the metallic-ink serigraph, a technique with deep roots in postwar British screenprinting that he has used to render English meadow, copper sunset, and silver dusk in editions that stay legibly Japanese in their reduction and quiet.