Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki Biography

B. 1940, Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.

Prolific and contentious, Nobuyoshi Araki is a pioneer in private photography and has delved into themes surrounding sex, death, and domination since the 1960s. Exemplified by up-close, personal snapshots of naked women gazing emptily into the camera, Araki has photographed the extremes of reality and fiction, Eros (life/ sex) and Thanatos (death), capturing the opposing elements of the two.

Born in 1940, in Tokyo, Japan, Araki studied photography from 1959-1963 and in 1963 went to work at the advertising agency Dentsu.

Araki’s has exhibited in museums worldwide including solo exhibitions at The Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, as well as in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA; Tate Modern, London, UK; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark.

His work is in major public collections such as Art Gallery of New South Wales, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto(CAMK), Japan; Deutsche Bank; Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France; M+, Hong Kong, Tate, London, UK; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; and The UBS Art Collection.