Artist

ISOBE was born in 1935 in Tokyo and lives there now. While still a high school student he became the youngest member of the Democratic Artists Association and also studied under Ei-Q. Having made reliefs and prints involving the repetition of emblems and multi-layered paintings referencing primitive art, Isobe was praised in the 1960s as representing a link between the abstraction of the 1950s and the everyday image-based collages of 1960s Pop Art. However, after traveling to the United States in the late 1960s and studying environmental design, the focus of his career shifted and he has been a pioneer in that field ever since. In recent years, he has been creating works on the subject of the relationship between the transformation of the natural environment and regional societies. In 2007 he held a solo exhibition, “Summer Happening,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. He participated in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale between 2000 and 2015. In 2013 he participated in Art Setouchi.