This exhibition spotlights the work of seven contemporary artists who burn with a passion for drawing and for representing all kinds of physical phenomena as well as the spiritual world that surrounds us by using their own eyes and hands and, moreover, with reference to the works mainly from our own collection, it makes an attempt to approach hidden relationships between form and abstraction in the visual arts.
Tomoo Gokita makes a strong impression on those who view his works through his human figures drawn in monochrome. Anders Edström, a photographer from Sweden, is trying to capture things that are invisible to the eye. In the paintings of Jun Tsunoda, soft colours and delicate forms melt on the picture surface. Shingo Francis seeks the essence of light on a calm and profound colour plane. Niro Nozawa dynamically draws various scenes reflected on the surface of water. Yuji Akatsuka recalls within the picture space the imagined scenery of his distant memories. And Tamihito Yoshikawa seeks out colour forms in the texture of his solid oil painting.
In concert with the artists mentioned above, the exhibition also features works by master artists who influenced them to a certain extent, including Monet, Picasso, Braque, Wols, Morandi, Sam Francis and Cy Twombly. Although each of these artists belongs to a different culture and era, we would be gratified if the exhibition's viewers are able to grasp an essential theme of modern art that has been inherited by each of these individual works, namely, "how the essence of the subject can be represented," through interaction with the exhibited works.
Hightlights
1. All the works of Tomoo Gokita on view at the present exhibition were drawn with acrylic gouache paint in the two colours of black and white. This form of painting is known as grisaille in the context of Western classic technique, and it was commonly used to produce study works prior to painting in colour. Strangely, however, when we look carefully at these works by Gokita, we can sense a colour taste of blue or purple in his gray tones. Gokita can be described as an artist who does not adhere to any of the formal painting conventions and who possesses sufficient courage and talent to freely draw his own world. In the same room, Sylvette, a work by Picasso, is exhibited from the museum’s own collection. This painting was executed using brown as well as black and white in what is called camaieu according to classic technique. Here, the 73-year-old Picasso depicted the 19-year-old Sylvette in the nude, although she only agreed to be his model because he had promised her that she would pose wearing clothes. While capturing the model’s facial expression immediately, Picasso treated her naked body using a kind of Cubist’s technique by making full use of his rich imagination.
2. This exhibition introduces one of the rarely seen early works by Morandi from a collection in Italy. In producing this painting, the artist made rather lavish use of paints in comparison with his latter works, with the intention of capturing the quality of each form of the depicted objects directly from the front. At the same time, the calm image of abstract space that we recognize as a characteristic of Morandi’s art already appears to be taking shape in this early work. Jun Tsunoda’s work often expresses mysterious forms that seem to be floating in the obscure picture space, which can be considered as both abstract and figurative in a positive sense, based on his exquisite sense of colour. And although these two artists never met, there appears to be a mutual resonance of some kind in the profound qualities of their works.
3. The present exhibition includes two representative paintings by Wols, which have been specially loaned to the museum for the occasion. His works appear to have released images that emerged in his mind onto the picture surface in such a way as not to make them arbitrary as far as possible. Somewhat similarly, Anders Edström’s photographs seem to reveal the real world naturally without any sense of arbitrariness. Although the two artists are working in different fields of expression, we can recognize that they share a common background of creation in terms of their artistic viewpoints, with which they explore the borderline between human consciousness and unconsciousness.
4. Untitled, a work by Sam Francis in the museum’s own collection, was executed at the age of 29 and is regarded as a representative example of the artist’s early period. Shingo Francis, who is the son of Sam Francis, decided to become a painter as his father had done before him and since that time he has solemnly continued to create paintings in profound monotone colours. In the purple series, which form part of the present exhibition, it is significant that in place of the borderlines that were a clear element of his earlier works, these pictures feature an obscure and deeply transparent pale purple border area. It will be exciting to witness the moment when the works of these two artists are brought together in the same exhibition space for the first time. And furthermore, the present exhibition also provides a welcome opportunity to view the black monotone tonality that characterizes the work of Ad Reinhardt.
5. At a glance, the works of Yuji Akatsuka have a tendency to make their viewers wonder whether they are rather poorly painted pictures, and this is one of the artist’s most marked characteristics. What has Akatsuka, who was originally a technician, done in order to realise his ideal and innocent painting space? It seems that he has given perspective to the whole by concentrating on the two elements of the vertical and the horizontal and he has also repeatedly drawn essentially pure lines in order to approach the unknown world as if he were climbing a mountain step by step. Akatsuka happened to have an opportunity to see Georges Braque’s painting Bather in the museum’s collection and at that time he pointed out that it had a similar picture structure to that of his own series of paintings entitled another mountain.
6. In his painting After Rain / Memory, Niro Nozawa has drawn on his own memory and sensitivity to produce an abstract representation of the scenery of sky and trees reflected in a puddle after rain. The artist conveys an impression of verticality by depicting the shadow of a tree on the upper central part of the canvas to draw the glances of the viewers upward from the picture surface. At this exhibition, a work by Monet entitled Nymphéas from the museum’s own collection is hung next to that by Nozawa. A brief inspection of Monet’s Nymphéas reveals it to have a triangular composition in which the colour plane of bright sky is reflected on the surface of the pond and also that the apex of this triangle leads the viewers’ eyes naturally in an upper direction.
7. The artist who most influenced Tamihito Yoshikawa at the start of his journey to form his own style was German painter, Hans Hartung (1904-1989), and another of his major influences was the late Cy Twombly. Indeed, it may have been inevitable that Yoshikawa’s interest would be drawn to Twombly’s three-dimensional works in particular, since the younger artist had initially studied sculpture. In this way, the stance toward creation that is common to Twombly and Yoshikawa is their technique for treating forms and colours in a symbolic way by making full use of their materials, including canvases, brushes, paints and painting knives, and then to finally focus their approach on visual beauty. Moreover, in Yoshikawa’s recent works, it is possible to discern his own original harmony in the balance of colours and colour materials.
About the Artists
Tomoo Gokita (1969)
Born in Tokyo and currently living in Tokyo.
In 2000, Tomoo Gokita published an art book, Lingerie Wrestling, from Little More Co., Ltd. Gokita's early works, which achieved cult-like popularity, were mainly drawings set down on paper in an improvisational way. They were not only exhibited at galleries and other spaces but many were also published as illustrations and reproductions in artistic magazines. The surrealistic black and white figures he has depicted in recent years using gouache on canvas have attracted prompt attention in New York, and Gokita has also broadened his range of activities both in the art world and in a variety of other fields.
Anders Edstrom (1966)
Born in Frösö, Sweden, and currently living in Tokyo.
Anders Edström is a photographer and a filmmaker. Upon moving to Paris in 1990, he began working closely with designer Martin Margiela and spent many years taking photographs for Maison Martin Margiela. He has published his photographs in various magazines in France and abroad, such as the French magazine Purple, and he has also shot campaign photographs for fashion brands. Since 2001, Edström has made several films with C.W. Winter, including a collaboration with guitarist Derek Bailey, One Plus One 2, as well as a narrative feature film, The Anchorage, which won a Golden Leopard Prize at the Locarno International Film Festival 2009. Since 2004, he has lived in Tokyo.
Jun Tsunoda (1960)
Born in Aichi and currently living in Tokyo.
After graduating from Tama Art University, Jun Tsunoda displayed his talent as an art director in the advertising and publishing trade fields beginning in the 1980s and was also highly evaluated as a graphic designer. For many years he had been creating paintings as his lifework, and from around 2000 he began to properly exhibit these works, which attracted considerable public attention. In addition to painting using acrylic paints, he employs a variety of other materials and methods, such as watercolour, collage and silkscreen, and his work is characterized by the use of rich colours and lines filled with musical sensitivity.
Shingo Francis (1969)
Born in Santa Monica, California and currently living in New York.
Shingo Francis is a painter who entered the art world as a serious artist in Japan after gaining a Bachelor's Degree of Fine Arts at Pitzer College, Claremont, California. He began his career as a painter by creating a series of works in which he represented a transparent world of deep navy blue monotones in paintings with extremely small component elements. In parallel with his work in oils, Francis also depicts optical phenomena in watercolours on large-sized rolled paper on an experimental basis in an attempt to transpose into his colours various optical phenomena that appear in the atmosphere.
Niro Nozawa (1957)
Born in Ibaraki and currently living in Ibaraki.
After completing a Postgraduate Course in Art at the University of Tsukuba, Niro Nozawa worked as an art teacher in a high school for many years, and he is now a tutor at Meisei University. His mental strength in confronting oil paint as a material without flinching is linked directly to the attractiveness of his work. His brush strokes, made by moving his entire body and with the full use of a special rubber spatula known as a squeegee, appear to be permeated with his delicate view, which merges seamlessly with natural phenomena.
Yuji Akatsuka (1955)
Born in Kagoshima and currently living in Chiba.
Yuji Akatsuka completed a Master's Degree Course at the Postgraduate School of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (the present Tokyo University of the Arts), where he majored in oil painting and print work. After graduation, he initially attempted to work as a graphic designer and illustrator, and then, gripped with new determination, he decided to become a painter. His series of early works entitled "canary", in which forms like shadows were depicted on large canvases, were awarded high evaluations. In his latest series, "another mountain", Akatsuka is attempting to capture the theoretical development of a painting structure to a higher level than previously.
Tamihito Yoshikawa (1965)
Born in Chiba and currently living in Chiba.
While taking a Master's Degree Course at the Graduate School of Musashino Art University, Tamihito Yoshikawa held his first solo exhibition at Kamakura Gallery under the recommendation of Professor Teruo Fujieda, and from that time on he has continued to exhibit his works mainly at this gallery. Yoshikawa's experience in the restoration of paintings has provided him with knowledge of materials science that he has utilized to good effect in his own creative work. It is partly as a result of this applied experience that the delicate mixture of colours developing on the canvas and the tactile elements of the paint layers on the picture surface succeed so well in capturing the viewers' attention. Yoshikawa can be described as an artist who combines a craftsman-like temperament with a delicate sensitivity.
