Fumiko Hori

FUMIKO HORI

Fumiko Hori (堀 文子, Hori Fumiko, July 2, 1918 – February 5, 2019) was a Japanese artist, known for her paintings in the Nihonga style. She was born to a scholarly family in Hirakawacho, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1918. In 1940, she graduated from Women's School of Fine Arts (now Joshibi University of Art and Design). She trained in Nihonga, a traditional Japanese painting style. In 1952, she won the Uemura Shōen Award, given to outstanding Japanese female painters. Hori lived in Arezzo, in Tuscany, Italy, for five years from 1987, setting up a studio there and painting colourful images of the local setting. She continued to travel to countries around the world, including such destinations as the Amazon, Nepal, and Mexico. The Museum of Modern Art in Hayama showed a retrospective of her work from November 2017 to March 2018; the earliest piece was a self-portrait from 1930, and the most recent piece was Red-Flowering Japanese Apricot, painted in 2016 when Hori was 98 years old. Hori died on February 5, 2019, at a hospital in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, at age 100. The Narukawa Art Museum in Hakone, home of over 100 of her works, hosted a memorial exhibition from July to November 2019.