Hideko Fukushima (1927–1997) was an avant-garde painter who emerged in the late 1940s.
Born in Tokyo in 1927, she studied painting at Bunka Gakuin’s Women’s Department.
After graduation, she attended the Modern Art Summer Seminar and exhibited her works at the Shichiyō-kai, the Bijutsu Bunka Exhibition, and the Women Painters Exhibition. She later joined the Experimental Workshop, an interdisciplinary art collective led by Shūzō Takiguchi, alongside Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Shōzō Kitadai, and her younger brother Kazuo Fukushima.
Over the course of seven years, while each member pursued diverse activities, Fukushima contributed significantly to the group’s development by engaging in stage and costume design for ballet, producing paintings and reliefs, and collaborating with members on audio-visual works using auto-slide projection.
While deeply involved in the Experimental Workshop’s pursuit of a new, integrated art form, Fukushima simultaneously continued to develop her own distinctive painting practice.
From the beginning of her career, she experimented with abstraction, influenced by contemporaries such as Shōzō Kitadai and Nobuya Abe, while steadily seeking her own artistic language. By the mid-1950s, she had established a unique method characterized by stamped circles, along with compositions structured through rectangles and linear forms.