Kim Uchiyama

Kim Uchiyama (born 1955) is an American abstract painter based in New York City. Her work distills visual tropes of nature and architecture—typically inspired by the Mediterranean region—into a minimalist, geometric vocabulary of stacked, colored horizontal bands and vertical bars, which she often punctuates with bands of unpainted linen or canvas.

Rooted in bedrock modernist concerns such as symmetry, proportion and simplicity, her paintings have been described as "Apollonian" orchestrations of color and shape that suggest idealized landscapes, structures and harmonic relationships.

Uchiyama's work belongs to the art collections of the Delaware Art Museum, Princeton University Art Museum and San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts. She has exhibited at the Baker Museum, Des Moines Art Center, LSU Museum of Art and South Bend Museum of Art, among others. She is a member of American Abstract Artists and became the organization's president in 2025.

Life and career Uchiyama was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1955. In 1976, she attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art. She appeared in the surveys "The Onward of Art" (2016) and "Blurring Boundaries: Women of the American Abstract Artists 1936-Present" (2018–23), among others.

Work and reception

Since the mid-2000s, Uchiyama's art has been largely inspired by the sensations she has experienced in Mediterranean locales. She seeks to convey in minimal, abstract language and color such things as the area's natural light, shifting hues, and the sensual resonance and ancient architectural forms of its excavated temples and ruins. and artist residencies from Art Cake (2024), the BAU Institute (2006, 2007, 2011), MacDowell (2007, 2010) and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2009, 2012), among other organizations.

Uchiyama's work is in the collections of Architectenatelier Wins (Belgium), Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Delaware Art Museum, Ewing Gallery of Art & Architecture (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Princeton University Art Museum, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Sarah Moody Gallery of Art (University of Alabama), and Spazio Contemporaneo Agorà, as well as private collections.