Axel Vervoordt Gallery is proud to present a solo booth by Japanese artist Norio Imai (Osaka, 1946), focusing on the artist's multidisciplinary practice from the 196os-7os to recent works including installation, painting, experimental film, and photography. Imai is known not only for his immense, white monochrome works but also for having become one of the youngest members of the Gutai Art Association when he joined at the age of seventeen in 1965. From the very start of his artistic career, Imai challenges the dogma of artistic convention. It is with this attitude in his works that brought a sense of renewal and new industrial sensibility to the Gutai group and shaped him into a strong vocal figure of the century today.
The selection of works for the booth aims to explore Norio Imai's seven years as a Gutai member, and multidisciplinary practice from the late 70s until today. His artistic practices exist across multiple mediums, which are not only confined to the limits of the canvas, but beyond that by expressing the materiality of medium and time through photography, video and sound.
In the mid-196os, the rise of a new generation of Gutai artists, including Imai, transformed Jiro Yoshihara's commitment to originality with works that experiment with technology and cutting-edge industrial materials. Presented at our booth, "Work Circle F" (1964) is an epitome of Imai's early works from the period, where he creates bulbous reliefs in between object and painting, by placing material underneath the surface of his works. Considering white to be the ultimate colour, a non-colour that combines all colours in perfect harmony, Imai often repaints his work with an additional layer of paint to preserve the depth and purity of the whiteness. As Imai describes the colour, "white is a landscape made up of nothingness and emptiness". Similar work from the “White Ceremony” series will be presented at the booth as well. These works were originally created in 1966 for his first solo exhibition at Gutai Pinacotheca.
Imai remained as a Gutai member until the group disbanded in 1972. In the 1970s, while continuing to explore materials and matter, Imai's artistic focus shifted to sound, photography, and video, in which conceptual tendencies were strengthened. He began to investigate and document visualization across time and space.
In a dark room within our booth, we will show a film work "En" (Circle) from 1967- The projection is a composition of circular vibrating flashes at the rate of 24 frames per second, realised with a hole punch on each frame of a filmstrip, creating a void that appears as a white circle on the screen. The film work continues Imai's conceptual investigations from his early white relief works while elaborating the artist's critical response to Yoshihara's Circle paintings. As Ming Tiampo explains in her essay, The Medium is the Message: Imai Norio, the work can be considered as a transition to the artist's second phase of production, a post-Gutai experience where "the medium's relationship with time, space and material were often a central concern."
“Daily Portraits" (1979) consists of the artist's daily self-portrait taken with a polaroid camera, arranged in thirty-six acrylic boxes, in which Imai poses without any facial expression while holding the picture from the previous day. This repetitive performance started in 1979 and continues until today.
Presented in dialogue with his Gutai works are works created in recent years, where Imai revisits dimensionality, space, and the void through his attention to surface and material exploration. This includes "White Ceremony - 2 Holes B" (2014), "Mandala White Painting 1-9" (2019), and a series of sculptural wall works titled "Shadow of Memory" (2008-2009). Recent works of this aesthetic may be considered a revival of his white relief works from the Gutai period.
Throughout his artistic journey, Imai sought to ground his work in the materiality of medium and of time, captured and presented through a multidisciplinary practice. Whether in paintings, kinetic sound work, experimental film or photography, Imai's oeuvre is embedded in his fundamental and experimental practice from the Gutai period. Ultimately, his works highlight the importance of "lived" time, and challenges the possibilities of medium, materials and human interaction.
