Minoru Onoda

Onoda Minoru was part of the second generation of Gutai artists. He began making paintings using dots of various sizes and colours in 1961. Onoda described these as ‘propagation paintings’. For him, the systematic repetition of dots was a way to think mechanically. Through this technique, he hoped to counter the subjectivity of action-based painting. Onoda was also responding to the industrialisation of Japan during the post-war period. He found inspiration in the ‘vast meaninglessness’ of machine-made, identically duplicated objects.