DP ANG (PDF) 09/03/06 - Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain ...

M A R C H 4 — M A Y 2 8 , 2 0 0 6

TADANORI YOKOO From
2006 the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is presenting, for the first time outside
of Japan, an exhibition dedicated to the paintings of Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo. A veritable
graphic design icon in the 60’s and 70’s, Tadanori Yokoo (born in 1936) started his
career in advertising and illustration and soon gained international recognition. Playing
with styles from different periods, he developed an idiosyncratic language, appropriating
elements from the graphic arts tradition in Japanese culture as well as from Western references.
Geishas, rising suns, blond pin-ups, and Hokusai-style waves are some of his favorite
motifs. Through a process of combination and accumulation, he creates a great diversity of
imagery based on repetition and borrowing, pastiching both Eastern and Western art forms
as well as his own compositions.
In 1980, he wrote his “artist’s manifesto”, marking a turning
point in his career. He decided to limit his graphic arts
work in order to devote himself mainly to painting. In his
paintings he explores themes emerging from a personal and
collective memory, such as death, war, society, life, spirituality
and dreams. Yokoo’s works are deeply rooted in the
culture of his native country and reflect the concerns of a
civilization torn between modern development and its
attachment to ancient traditions. In creating a true Pop Art
imagery, Yokoo is able to reveal, better than anyone else,
the culture of post-war Japan.
The paintings exhibited at the Fondation Cartier were realized
between 1965 and 2006. The exhibition presents a
large selection of paintings from Yokoo’s red series. This
color, metaphorically suggestive of Death, seems to obsess
the artist. For Yokoo, “This series of works in red is based on
the observation that there is everyday life in death. Thanks
to the color red, death slowly gains ground in the heart of
life itself, and life and death wind up being as inseparable as
the two sides of a coin.”* Against a starry night, volcanoes,
pyramids and unfinished urban landscapes are deconstructed,
isolated, or accompanied by their reflection, and
admixed with a gush of subjects as astonishing as a skull, a
flying saucer, a lion or a steam engine. In the red series, as
*Interview with Tadanori Yokoo by Takayo Iida.
Excerpt from the exhibition catalog.
March 4 to May 28,
in all of the works in the exhibition, each element’s place in
the composition is the result of the mental associations it
entertains with the others, all of which is entirely dictated by
the artist’s subjectivity: “There is an area in the unconscious
that merges with the conscious mind. If you look at these
two poles outside modern ways of thinking, then it’s true
that the source of my inspiration is subconscious and
archaic.”* Beyond the wide spectrum of colors used by
Yokoo, the extraordinary stylistic diversity of his paintings
attest to an oeuvre which is perpetually reinventing itself.
The large-scale installation consisting of 3,700 postcards
and a painting that covers an entire wall of the exhibition in
a gigantic collage, adheres to the artist’s most cherished
compositional principles: borrowing, pastiching, repeating
an obsessional motif. At the same time, it amplifies the
metaphor of collapse—found throughout his oeuvre—to
unprecedented proportions.
The selection of graphic works exhibited on the mezzanine
gives a brief survey of the illustrations created by Yokoo
between 1965 and 1997. Commissioned by a wide variety
of clients such as museums, theatres, publishers and fashion
designers, they attest to Yokoo’s close ties with artists such
as Yukio Mishima, Issey Miyake and more recently, Naoki
Takizawa.
As part of the Tadanori Yokoo exhibition, young visitors (age 6 and
up) are invited to make their own graphic compositions in postermaking
workshops to be held on Wednesdays, March 29 and
May 3 at 3:00 pm. They may also participate in Wednesday drawing
and painting workshops which will introduce them to Tadanori
Yokoo’s red paintings on April 19 and May 17 at 3:00 pm.

BIOGRAPHY
Tadanori Yokoo was born in 1936 in
Nishiwaki, Japan (Hyogo Prefecture). At
the age of 24, he left to study at the Nippon Design Center
in Tokyo and began working in illustration and advertising.
He was soon remarked by figures like the writer Yukio
Mishima and the fashion designer Issey Miyake, and he
would go on to collaborate closely with them for many
years. Yokoo became involved in the student protest movements
that broke out in the 60‘s, and was an active member
of the new artistic underground scene. He notably designed
posters for the avant-garde theater company Jokyo Gekijo
(“Situation Theatre”) in 1967 and played the leading role
in Nagisa Oshima’s film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief in 1968.
A prolific artist who has worked in a wide variety of disciplines—painting,
graphic design, as well as sets and
costumes for kyogen and kabuki theatre—, Tadanori Yokoo
has become a veritable icon in the Japanese art world. In
1980, he began devoting himself entirely to painting.
Many solo exhibitions have been dedicated to his
graphic arts work in Japan, the United States and Europe. His
exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is
the first European exhibition of his paintings. Tadanori Yokoo
is represented by the gallery SCAI the Bathhouse in Tokyo.
EXHIBITION CATALOG
Tadanori Yokoo
Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain/
London-New York: Thames & Hudson
Hardback, English version
28 x 22 cm, 156 pages, 120 color reproductions
Photographs of Yokoo by Daido Moriyama
Interview with the artist by Takayo Iida
Text by Jacqueline Lichtenstein
Graphic design: Larry Kazal, Paris
Publication: March, 2006
Price: 35€
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2006 Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris
2005 Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto
Ikeda Museum of 20th Century Art
The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama
2004 Miyazaki Prefectural Art Museum
2003 The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
Fukuoka Art Museum
2002 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo/
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
2001 The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama
Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
1997 Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kobe/
The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama
1995 Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
1994 Contemporary Art Center, New-Orleans
Park Tower Hall, Tokyo
1987 The Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
1986 Israel Museum, Jerusalem
1985 Kunstlerhause Bethanien, Berlin
1983 Musée de la Publicité, Paris
1982 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
1974 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
1973 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
1972 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Upcoming Exhibitions
Zaha Hadid
June 20—October 1st, 2006
Born in Bagdad in 1950, Zaha Hadid, who lives in London,
became the first woman to be awarded the prestigious
Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. A “deconstructivist”
architect whose visionary aesthetics has led her to create
buildings that are complex yet light, moving from the
elongated line to the curve in an interplay of superimposed
planes and vertiginous verticality. For her exhibition
at the Fondation Cartier she is designing a project specially
for the ground floor of Jean Nouvel’s building.
Agnès Varda, L’ÎLE ET ELLE
June 20—October 1st, 2006
Agnès Varda has been making films since 1954. She is
most notably the director of Cleo from 5 to 7, Vagabond,
Jacquot, The Gleaners & I. Since Patatutopia, the triple
video installation she presented at the Venice Biennale in
2003, and an exhibition at the Aboucaya Gallery in Paris in
2005, she has decided to challenge herself as a filmmaker
by trying out new configurations. The Fondation Cartier
pour l’art contemporain has invited Agnès Varda to take
over its underground floor for an exhibition to include
installations specially created, for the most part, for the
occasion. The point of departure for all of them will be the
Île de Noirmoutier, an island she regularly returns to.
Between the reality of the inhabitants and her personal
reveries, she will draw her own island.
Practical Information
Exhibition Abroad
The Collection
of the Fondation Cartier
pour l’art contemporain
in Tokyo
April 22—July 2, 2006
Press opening on Thursday, April 20, 2006
La Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain will be showing
major works from its collection at the MOT (Museum
of Contemporary Art) in Tokyo. This exhibition brings
together 32 contemporary artists from around the world
and looks back on 20 years of arts patronage by Cartier. It
will feature an ensemble of monumental pieces—most of
them commissioned by the Fondation Cartier—and bring
together some of the biggest names on the international
arts scene.
The Fondation Cartier has regularly been an ambassador
in Europe for the most contemporary trends in Japanese
culture via its many exhibitions of Japanese artists. In
deciding to unveil the most important works in its collection,
it thus seemed natural for the Fondation Cartier to
reach out to Japanese audiences in this comprehensive
exhibition which should appeal to specialists as well as to
the general public.
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is open to the public every day except Monday,
from 12:00 pm to 8:00 pm. Entrance fee: 6,50€, reduced rate*: 4,50€
Nomadics Nights: Black Nights cycle
Thursday evenings at 8:30 pm (except special evenings)
Information and reservations (imperative), every day, except Monday, from 12:00 pm to 8:00 pm: tel + 33 (0)1 42 18 56 72
Entrance fee: 8€, reduced rate*: 6,50€
*students, individuals under 25, carte Senior, Amis des Musées, unemployed. Free admission: Cercle des amis, under 10, ICOM
Lecture series, activities for children, The Circle of Friends, group visits: tel 01 42 18 56 67
261, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris – tél 01 42 18 56 50 fax 01 42 18 56 52
metro Raspail or Denfert-Rochereau – bus 38, 68, 88, 91 – RER B: Denfert-Rochereau
fondation.cartier.com
The exhibition Tadanori Yokoo was organized with the support of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain,
under the aegis of the Fondation de France and with the sponsorship of Cartier.
Press Information
Linda Chenit
assisted by Hélène Cahuzac
Tel +33 (0)1 42 18 56 77/65
Fax +33 (0)1 42 18 56 52
linda.chenit@fondation.cartier.com
images on line: fondation.cartier.com
Hong Kong, 1997. Private collection
© Tadanori Yokoo