Hiroshi Shimura

Hiroshi Shimura (born 1949, Tokyo) is a Japanese printmaker who has worked from Cambridge, England, since the 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 inks and atmospheric tonal gradients have been a defining technical interest.

Shimura studied art at Tokyo University of Education (a predecessor of the University of Tsukuba) and continued into graduate study at the same institution, joining a generation of Japanese printmakers who looked to Europe for further training. In 1975 he relocated to England, enrolling at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology to study design, printing, and reproduction. He has divided his time between Japan and Cambridge ever since, and his prints are held in the University of Cambridge's permanent collection.

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. Titles such as Bronze Fantasy, Copper Fantasy, Gold Forest, and Silver Forest Breeze 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. The same lyrical-landscape vocabulary extends across his catalog to the rural scenery of Cambridgeshire and eastern England, including the Fens.

In parallel with his fine-art editions, Shimura works in photography and video, and his still and moving-image work has been shown at events such as the Heartland Arts Event in Roppongi, Tokyo. His prints have appeared in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London and the CWAJ Print Show in Tokyo, alongside solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Kobe, and the UK, and he is represented by specialist Japanese-print dealers including Hanga Ten. In Japan, the Manor House Museum in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, permanently houses 82 of his silkscreen works.

The wider arc of Shimura's career places him among a small group of Japanese-born printmakers who completed their primary training in Japan, settled in Western Europe, 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.