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

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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
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