Kaigado Gallery is pleased to announce that Yoko Yamamoto’s solo exhibition is held in this month as usual. This year, we will introduce a series of the copper paintings from a Spanish book of poems and drawings “Platero and I”.

“Platero and I”, a collection of prose poems written by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), the Spanish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was originally published in 1917. A new Japanese version of “Platero and I”, which translated into Japanese by a soprano singer, Mutsumi Hatano, and its illustrations are drawn by Yoko Yamamoto was published last year. This time, Kaigado Gallery introduces some of the paintings of the main character, Platero the donkey. At the same time, we are exhibiting a selection of beautiful and playful works from Tashinami, Shakespeare, and Home series.　Please feel free to stop by.

Artist profile

A copperplate artist.
Born in 1952 in Saitama, and raised in Osaka, Japan.
Graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts, majoring in Western-style painting.

The Seibu Prize of the Japan Contemporary Print Award Exhibition, 1978
Kyoto City Art Newcomer’s Award, 1980
Korea International Print Biennial Award of Excellence 1983
Kodansha Publishing Culture Award, Book Design Award 1992
Kyoto Prefecture Culture Award for Distinguished Service 2007
Kyoto Art and Culture Prize in 2011
Kyoto City Cultural Merit Award in 2013

Yoko Yamamoto has established her own world of copperplate printing with urban, light and stylish colors, and she has developed a genre-crossing collaboration that fuses painting with music and poetry. She has been in charge of the bindings and illustrations for a number of books. The exhibition “Yoko Yamamoto’s Amusement Park” traveled to 10 museums across Japan. She also created stained-glass windows for the Railway Museum in 2007, and stained-glass windows and a mosaic mural for Shinjuku Sanchome Station on the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line in 2008. A solo exhibition consisting of 24 hanging scrolls and 5 small prints included in “Yoko Yamamoto’s Himekimitachi Himegimi@heian” (Kodansha) was held at Agenzia04 gallery in Bologna, Italy. Since 2005, she has been involved in “hospital art” as part of her life’s work. She has expanded her activities to include the creation of murals in the medical field to help patients, doctors and nurses feel at ease with the healing power of art.