Nobuo Sekine

Nobuo Sekine was born on September 19, 1942, in Shiki City, Saitama Prefecture, Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1962 and studied oil painting in the painting department at Tama Art University, where his teachers included Yoshishige Saito and Jiro Takamatsu; sources differ on whether his 1968 credential was formally a BFA or an MFA, though all agree he completed his studies that year.

In 1968, Sekine created Phase, Mother Earth for an open-air sculpture exhibition at Suma Rikyu Park in Kobe: a large cylindrical hole dug into the earth, its excavated soil compacted into a matching cylindrical mound beside it. The work won the Asahi Newspaper Prize that year and is widely credited as the founding gesture of Mono-ha, a movement whose name translates roughly to "School of Things." Working alongside artists including Lee Ufan and his own teacher Jiro Takamatsu, Sekine and the Mono-ha circle rejected illusion and composition in favor of presenting materials, stone, steel, glass, sponge, water, as they existed in real space.

In 1970, Sekine represented Japan at the 35th Venice Biennale with works from his Phase of Nothingness series, pairing polished stainless steel columns with natural stones or boulders. Through the 1970s his work traveled across Europe, including a permanent installation, the "Sekine Corner," established at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 1977, and a large solo exhibition, Phases of Nothingness, at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway in 1979. His later career took him between Tokyo and Los Angeles, and his work continued to be included in major historical surveys of postwar Japanese and international art, including Century City at Tate Modern in 2001, Tokyo 1955 to 1970: A New Avant-Garde at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012, and Prima Materia at the Pinault Collection's Punta della Dogana in 2013.

Nobuo Sekine died on May 13, 2019, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 76. His gallery at the time, Blum & Poe, confirmed the news; obituaries appeared in Artforum, Artsy, and ArtAsiaPacific, among other major art publications.

Sekine's reputation is built on his role as an originator rather than a follower: Phase, Mother Earth is treated in the standard art-historical account as the work that opened the Mono-ha movement, and his selection to represent Japan at the 1970 Venice Biennale extended that recognition internationally. Later museum reassessments, including Tate Modern's Century City in 2001, MoMA's Tokyo 1955 to 1970 in 2012, and the Pinault Collection's Prima Materia in 2013, have continued to position Sekine within a broader international conversation about postwar and contemporary sculpture built from raw, unaltered material rather than composed illusion.

Sekine's best-documented auction result is Phase of Nothingness, Black, which sold at SBI Art Auction in Tokyo on June 26, 2021, for JPY 322,000,000 with buyer's premium (JPY 264,000,000 hammer). Auction-tracking sources also point to later sales in 2024 and a reported 2026 record price, but the underlying figures for those sales are not confirmed in available sources, so the 2021 result is the highest figure that can be stated here with a specific price, house, and date. Market databases record several hundred auction appearances for the artist over time, the large majority at modest prices, with the market's highest results concentrated in works from the historic Phase series. This is consistent with an artist whose reputation rests primarily on museum-level historical importance rather than on a deep, liquid secondary market, and it means individual results should be read in the context of the specific work rather than as evidence of a broad, established price curve.

No catalogue raisonne has been identified for Sekine, and public sources do not clearly establish which gallery, if any, now represents his estate; his work was historically handled by Blum & Poe, now BLUM, and by Tokyo Gallery and BTAP during his lifetime. Combined with a comparatively thin auction record, this places extra weight on museum exhibition history, prior gallery documentation, and specialist review when evaluating any individual work. His deep presence in major museum collections across Japan, Europe, and the United States remains the strongest available signal of long-term art-historical standing.