D. Wigmore Fine Art Inc. is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition for Tadasky (b.1935, Tadasuke Kuwayama). Tadasky was a leading American artist in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye. Tadasky’s vibrant targets were then featured in numerous exhibitions across the United States and Japan for the rest of the 1960s. The gallery exhibition Control + Invention will feature 30 carefully selected paintings across five decades to show the immense variety Tadasky achieved with his circle compositions through color, line, and texture. Many of the paintings have not been seen since Tadasky’s major retrospective at the Tokyo Gallery in Japan in 1989. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with a text by Joe Houston, curator of the 2007 exhibition Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s and current curator of the Hallmark Art Collection.

Born in Nagoya, Japan, Tadasky grew up surrounded by skilled craftsmen in his family’s Shinto shrine building factory. As a student studying engineering in Tokyo in the mid-1950s, Tadasky discovered Bauhaus abstraction in American magazines and was particularly drawn to Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series. Joe Houston writes, “Painting of such deliberate clarity had no parallel in Japan, and yet, its formal rigor resonated with the purity of the Shinto architecture Tadasky had long admired.” Tadasky realized to work in pure abstraction, he would have to move to the United States. He spent several years building up a portfolio. In 1961 he gained admission to Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, but switched his destination to New York where he developed his concentric circle compositions first as a student at the Art Students League and then under the auspices of the Brooklyn Museum School.

Supporting himself with carpentry work, Tadasky came to the attention of Ivan Karp who hired Tadasky to make stretchers for many of the Castelli Gallery artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Ivan Karp brought Tadasky to the attention of Bill Seitz who was planning a MoMA exhibition of international perceptual abstraction titled The Responsive Eye to open in February of 1965. Tadasky’s concentric targets were selected for the exhibition’s poster. Dealer Sam Kootz gave Tadasky two solo exhibitions in 1965. The first opened in January in advance of the MoMA exhibition and by the second exhibition in October, Kootz had placed Tadasky’s paintings in over 100 important public and private collections. Further exhibitions were held at Fischbach Gallery in 1967 and 1969 and in Japan at the Tokyo Gallery in 1966 and at the Gutai Pinacotheca in 1967. After meteoric success in the 1960s, Tadasky’s opportunities for exhibitions diminished in the 1970s as Op art fell out of favor. Yet, Tadasky continued to work in his studio first envisioning and then executing his circle paintings for decades.

In the 2000s, Op art gained renewed attention as curators saw the continued relevance of perceptual art among today’s artists, who engage viewers through immersive approaches in painting, sculpture, video, and installation. As Joe Houston writes in the catalogue essay, “Such critical attention validates the significance of Op Art as a movement that heralded a profound shift from object to experience, privileging the viewer as an active participant in the aesthetic process.” Tadasky was strongly featured in the Columbus Museum of Art’s 2007 exhibition Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s. Recently Tadasky’s A-101, 1964 in MoMA’s collection was included in the exhibition Dynamo! A Century of Light and Motion in Art, 1913-2013 at the Grand Palais in Paris, solidifying Tadasky’s place in the canon of dynamic international abstraction of the last century.