Born in Kyoto in 1928 into a famous family of painters, his father was a collector of ancient Japanese ceramics and calligraphy. Hisao Domoto began painting at the age of 13, and attended the Kyoto School of Fine Arts from 1945 to 1949.
From 1948, he exhibited at the Tokyo Academy Salon. In 1952, he made his first trip to Europe, visiting Italy, Spain and France, where he spent several months and met his compatriots: Yasse Tabuchi, Toshimitsu Imai, Key Sato and Kumi Sugai. His discovery of the works of Dubuffet and Marino Marini led him to break away from classical Japanese painting.
He moved to Paris in 1955 and remained there until 1965. He settled at the Grande Chaumière in Goetz's studio, and became friends with Sam Francis, Riopelle, Soulages and Zao Wou-Ki. During his ten years in Paris, he played a leading role in promoting informal art, and was a committed intermediary between the Japanese avant-garde and Western artists. He is one of the leading figures of lyrical abstraction, while at the same time pursuing a singular career indissociable from his Japanese culture.
Represented by the Stadler gallery from 1957 to the early 1960s, he was also part of the Gutai movement for a time. Domoto met Michel Tapié at the end of the 1950s and they had a special relationship: Tapié wrote many prefaces to his exhibitions and was full of praise when he wrote about him. His first solo exhibition at the Galerie Stadler in 1957 enabled him to assert his membership of the Informels.
Domoto had a taste for shapes and their representation in space, but also for colours: bright tones, transparencies and opacities that responded to pure vermilion. His canvases are written in a way that plays on fullness and emptiness in a thoughtful duality. His painting ‘is characterised by a dynamic style involving splashes of colour of oriental essence, and whose gesturality, while evoking the movement of the elements, is integrated into European abstract expressionism’. Lydia Harambourg (L'Ecole de Paris 1945 -1965, Dictionnaire des Peintres, p.148).
In 1959, the famous Martha Jackson Gallery gave him a solo exhibition in New York. He exhibited works whose style was changing. In fact, from the early 60s, he began to attach symbolic importance to the circular form: for him, the circle is the basis of every form: ‘If you enlarge it, it becomes a huge circle and that gives a surface. If you reduce it, it becomes a point and the accumulation of these points creates the line’.
From 1963 onwards, a new style emerged in Domoto's work, in which he broke away from lyrical abstraction and the European informels and moved towards a new approach: he divided his canvases into several parts, used collages in the form of parallel folds, and concentrated on contrasting colours and geometric shapes. He called them ‘Solutions de Continuités’. This approach is based on the study of yin and yang and rectangular symbolic forms. His works in line with this new concept were awarded the Prix Arthur Lejwa at the Venice Biennale in 1964.
‘These are assemblages of horizontal strips (...) whose arrangement, far from being left to chance, obeys precise mathematical relationships. Numerous combinations of shapes in rhythmic relationship appear in this way. The decorative effect is obvious, but it is transcended by excess: the pure colour that is substituted for the old tachist grid is a symbolic abstraction of space and life. Beyond the purely plastic effect, an overwhelming truth emerges, that of a number, a proportion, a relationship.’ Pierre Restany (Hisao Domoto, ‘Cimaise’ magazine, 1963).
From the 1970s onwards, Domoto entered his third stylistic period, moving towards geometric structures derived from natural phenomena, with strong symbolism, giving profound meaning to his compositions based on a veritable dialectic of forms. The paintings are known as ‘Chain Reactions’, or ‘Possibility of Chain Reactions’.
In 1979, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris held its first major retrospective of his work. The 1980s, the artist's last period, saw the emergence of a form of tachism in Domoto's canvases, a sign of purity and extreme simplicity, the culmination of a lifetime of research leading to a minimalism that was ultimately very Japanese.
In 2005, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto organised a second major retrospective of his work. Domoto passed away in Japan in 2013 at the age of 85.