Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce the next exhibition, titled “The Masked Portrait,” dealing with aspects of Japanese contemporary art from 1949 to the present, curated by Midori Nishizawa. With works by thirty artists, this semi-survey exhibition provides a multi-faceted dialogue between the different periods and developments, exploring the inner depths of the creative dynamics of post-war Japanese art.
At 11:02am on August 9, 1945, the second atom bomb detonated on Nagasaki, violently stopping the hands of a now famous wristwatch. Three days earlier Hiroshima had suffered an equal blow. Japan was instantaneously forced into a new reality, necessitating painful rebirth of a culture and society. Post-war Japan endured rapid and successive changes, remaining rigorous and hopeful with the underlying notion that the eternal resides in the immaterial, meanwhile continually appropriating, cultivating and assimilating the western cultural barrage.
The exhibition begins with a Shoji Ueda photograph from 1949, Father, Mother and Children, where hints of early westernization are visible though still suggesting a seemingly innocent time represented by a solid, organized yet distant family structure. Twelve bells chime and resonate throughout the gallery in Work (Bell) by Gutai Art Association member Atsuko Tanaka who is most known for her seminal work Electric Dress (1956), where she draped illuminated light bulbs and a tangle of wires over her body from head to toe. Other key representative works from the avant-garde Gutai Art Association, founded in 1954, are on view. The radical, innovative workings of the group, with the founder Jiro Yoshihara’s mantra "Do not imitate others, make what nobody knows," are represented by artists Akira Kanayama who created paintings from self-made machines and Kazuo Shiraga who painted with his feet. Included in the exhibition are documentary photographs displaying several happenings staged by the Gutai Art Association from 1954 through 1958 by Saburo Murakami, Sadamasa Motonaga, Kazuo Shiraga and Atsuko Tanaka.
The volatile 1960's marked a period of unprecedented economic growth in Japan and brought a conceptual spirit of Anti-art and action, which swept the younger generation of artists who were activated by increasing self-destructive and aggressive methods of art making. Key works by Jiro Takamatsu, Genpei Akasegawa and Natsuyuki Nakanishi recount the period of 1963-64 when the three artists formed the group called the Hi Red Center. They conducted carefully orchestrated, nonsensical, suggestively aggressive performances in public locations such as the street (Cleaning Event, 1964) and on buildings roofs (Dropping Event, 1964). Photographer Minoru Hirata documented many of these "actions" where the group’s deep questioning of how art and life fit into society were captured.
