Atelier Incurve, located in Hirano-ku, Osaka, was founded in 2002 as an art studio and project office for base for Social Welfare Foundation SOOHKAI. It provides an environment appropriate for the artistic activities of artists with intellectual impairment and supports the artists as they establish themselves in the art world. Presently, twenty-eight artists make use of these services, and their unique activities attract positive attention at both domestic and international levels.

This exhibition focuses on three of the Atelier Incurve artists—Terao Katsuhiro, Shinki Tomoyuki, and Yumoto Mitsuo—introducing their work largely through recent works. Terao Katsuhiro (b. 1960) worked as a welder for twenty years at his father's steel fabrication shop before becoming an artist, and the motifs of all his works are steel. The finely detailed drawings that he calls his “plans” are filled with lines representing structural steel frame members and symbols representing welding points. Combat sports fan Shinki Tomoyuki (b. 1982) produces drawings of boxing, wrestling, and other martial arts. He accurately captures the moves of the muscular bodies and the way in which the fighters grapple each other through line drawings and bright colours, producing boldly deformed depictions that communicate the dynamic nature of the matches. Yumoto Mitsuo (b. 1978) finds motifs in familiar things such as buildings, ships, bugs, and birds. Constructing a strange world, he neatly produces colour fields with coloured pencils to produce drawings that are both vivid and give the impression of a heart-warming scene familiar from the past.

Each of the three artists produces works with very different characteristics, but they share the feature of not being forced into a mould, being unconstrained in terms of how they look at their subjects, in terms of their ideas, and in terms of their means of expression.
The single-minded concentration on their works produces a crystallisation of life in respect to each of the artists. The individualistic, highly creative works have the ability to help us rediscover the depth and the attraction of art.