Yoshimi Arts is pleased to announce Katsuo Tachi’s exhibition for the second time.

Between conceptual art, minimal art and new painting, Katsuo Tachi chose to work with painting the most, he believed it to be the best representative of the physicality of the body, and he continued painting until 2008, just before his death, and even with his short life as a painter, his works show significant change and development. 

From the beginning of 1990’s, organic entities began to appear in his paintings which are best described as bees, seemingly totally at odds with the purely abstract paintings with oil-colors on a more materialistic tone he had been producing until that time. 

Katsuo Tachi’s parents had been beekeepers, and as the Tachi family travelled with their bees in search of flowers all over the country, so he spent his childhood observing firsthand the transitions of the seasons, and the rhythms of the day, which would all later feed into his style for creating these abstract organic beings. 

Around the mid 1990’s, which is one of the works of this exhibition, the bee-like motif began to dissolve, and his images began to be drawn in swift strokes which covered the entire canvas. Upon entering the 2000s, abstract organisms which seem to embody intense ideas about the nature of life began to appear within the wide blank spaces of his paintings. It　was as if the blank space were allowing a place in time where that organism could drift near us to take form as something finite. The blank spaces were brushed with faint pearl colored paint which made us feel a slight materialistic texture, up until 2006. But from 2007 the organic motif still continued to grow, and he stopped applying any color to the blank spaces, and it seemed to create a space where we cannot identify whether the flow of time was present or not.

In our previous exhibition, we exhibited four of Katsuo Tachi’s works, which were drawn in 2008. This time we will introduce five works which were created from the 1990’s up until his later years, in an attempt to fragmentally trace his artistic journey. We hope this exhibition will be a good opportunity to consider what Tachi had attempted to accomplish with his work as a painter.