A Joint Retrospective
Before Tokyo was a global hub for Western art, Galerie Taménaga — one of the city’s pioneering galleries bridging Western and Japanese art — built a lasting relationship with two 20th-century masters: Japanese expat Takanori Oguiss and French painter Maurice Utrillo. Gallery founder Kiyoshi Tamenaga maintained a close 30-year friendship with Oguiss, and helped bring Utrillo’s first major retrospective to Japan in 1967. Drawing on these histories, the gallery is celebrating the two painters in a special joint retrospective.
Gathering 25 oil paintings, it traces how the two artists spent their careers capturing the unvarnished beauty and character of streets across Europe — the windswept lanes of Montmartre, the shifting light of Venetian canals and beyond. Featuring rich textures and a keen sensitivity to changing seasons, the show pairs Oguiss’s grounded eye with Utrillo’s poetic nostalgia, offering an intimate look at two contemporaries’ visual worlds.
