Born in Nagano Prefecture in 1912. He is regarded as a pioneer of abstract painting in Japan. He was active internationally, exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, and was unique in the postwar art world. In 1935, he was selected for the first time in the Nika Exhibition, and at the same time, he formed the avant-garde group “Black Colored Western Painting Exhibition” with young artists to start his career as an artist. By 1940, he was already producing abstract paintings with entirely geometrical compositions influenced by Cubism and Constructivism.

Around 1955, after a seven-year hiatus due to military service and internment in Siberia, he arrived at his own style, which consists of multiple circles with uniformly painted interiors in a single color, or a single such circle in the center of the picture, surrounded by a tight mesh of horizontal and vertical lines.

Vermilion and Orange Circles is a work from the same period, and it shows Onosato’s attitude of limiting the way of painting to the “circle” and pursuing the possibility of pure abstract painting composed of colors and lines. After 1960, the interior of the circle was further divided to increase the accuracy of the abstraction. Thereafter, Onosato continued to explore his own artistic world and develop his own unique pictorial expression using a wide variety of techniques, including oil, watercolor, lithograph, and silkscreen.