Sekine participated in the 7th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1955. In 1958, his work was selected for an exhibition curated by the French art critic Michel Tapié, The International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, which visited several cities in Japan. At the 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1963, Sekine presented a painting of an abacus for the first time. Although his work also featured other everyday subjects – including a series dedicated to gates and another to freight cars – the abacus became his most frequently recurring motif, presented in a variety of different configurations and colour schemes, creating abstract geometrical arrangements that blurred the line between the concrete (gutai) and illusion.
Sekine received the Mainichi Art Award in 1952. Some of his other notable exhibitions included Trends in Contemporary Art: Paintings and Sculptures (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 1964), the 2nd Nagoka Contemporary Art Museum Award Exhibition (Nagaoka-shi, Niigata, 1965) and The 1960s: A Decade of Change in Contemporary Japanese Art (which opened in 1981 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, then travelled to Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art). Works by Sekine are now in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagoya; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.; and the British Museum.
