Untitled (from the series Blind Paintings)
- Artist: Tomie Ohtake
- Date: 1962
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 850 × 750 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is “Untitled” by Tomie Ohtake, created in 1962. The oil on canvas shows a dramatic spiral of white and blue layers that almost look like a cosmic whirl. Ohtake built it in layers, each thin coat added with careful patience, a hallmark of her Blind Paintings series. In those works she painted in a state of “non‑seeing,” continually bringing her eye back to the blind spot of vision, making perception and time the core of the act. Though left untitled, the piece feels like a meditation on how things simply happen, echoing Zen ideas she absorbed in Brazil. The Brazilian artist Lygia Clark once said a painting by Ohtake has no title—it is. Here the spiral invites you to follow the rhythm of color and to feel the work’s inner motion without needing a name.
See it in person
Untitled (from the series Blind Paintings) is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
