Born in Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture, Genichiro Inokuma was a painter whose career unfolded across multiple cultural centers. After his first acceptance into the seventh Teiten exhibition in 1926 with Portrait of a Woman, he pursued studies in Paris and later worked in New York, maintaining an active practice while relocating between Tokyo and Hawaii. Prior to his move to New York, Inokuma primarily exhibited figurative works, including female figures.
　His extended residence in New York from 1955 to 1975 proved to be a decisive turning point in the evolution of his artistic language. The city, charged with postwar vitality and the emergence of new artistic movements such as Abstract Expressionism, provided fertile ground for experimentation. Encounters with contemporaries such as Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns further stimulated his shift toward abstraction.
　Around 1962, words associated with the "city," such as City and Street, began to appear in his titles, and his canvases became filled with compact, tatami-like short strokes. Inokuma described this visual language as "Confusion and Order." To him, New York—with its grid-like streets teeming with pedestrians and cars and its buildings undergoing constant cycles of construction and demolition—appeared almost animate, a spectacle of ceaseless motion and energy. As he observed the urban landscape day by day, the seeming chaos gradually revealed a hidden structure, an underlying order he came to regard as inherently beautiful.
　Map and Colors (1964), composed of delicate pale-blue strokes that span the entire canvas, stands as a clear articulation of Inokuma’s mature approach. The work offers an abstract distillation of the city’s rhythms, density, and structural intricacies.


* See Exh. cat.,
Genichiro Inokuma––Sharing Our Impressions and Coming to Like Him, Marugame, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018.



Lot.071 INOKUMA Genichiro
Map and Colors
Oil on board
100.8 × 75.5 cm (39⅝ × 29¾ in.) 
JPY 4,000,000 - 6,000,000
USD 25,600 - 38,500

Browse details & Place Bids

【Create an account】
Please sign up from the link below if you do not have an account to register as a bidder.
>> Create an account

【Participate in the bidding】
There are four bidding methods from which to choose.
A. In Parson
B. Absentee
C. By Telephone
D. To Bid Live
>> How to Buy

To bid by phone, online, or as absentee, you can register from our website.
*An account will be needed for bidding registration (If you are a registered customer and do not have a login account, or if you cannot log in with your account, please follow the procedure)
*Please make sure to check the condition of works before bidding.
>> Register for bidding
>> Create an account

Bid Submission Deadline:
[Lot. 001-229] 2026年1月23日（金）17:00迄
[Lot. 230-504] 2026年1月24日（土）17:00迄

*For those who have not received an email from us
It's possible that SBI Art Auction's confirmation e-mail has been labeled as a spam mail. You might be able to find confirmation e-mail from us in your spam mail folder.
As a friendly reminder, you may consider adjusting the filtering setting of your e-mail account to prevent any mails with sbigroup.co.jp／sbiartauction.co.jp domain from going to your spam mail folder in the future.