Word: artes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gasoline, 1989, a 9-ft.-high bulbous yellow pod, is the most startling work in the show. The creepy beauty and rich surface texture of Tsubaki's monstrous blob, with tentacle-like branches sprouting from its top, recall a fascination with the grotesque that characterized some Japanese avant-garde art of the 1950s and early '60s. Its inspiration: Japan's bombed-out landscape after World War II. Strains of this extreme aesthetic are still visible today in the ghoulish makeup and gestures of butoh dancers. Similarly, Shoko Maemoto creates souvenirs from a nightmare alley where fairy- tale fantasy meets...
This includes Western art history and aspects of Japan's own cultural past. Osaka native Yasumasa Morimura, for example, places himself as the main character in carefully staged and photographed "reproductions" of well-known Western paintings like Manet's Olympia. Tomiaki Yamamoto melds brushy abstract expressionism with the pattern-oriented design sensibility of traditional Japanese textiles. Often his splashy tableaux resemble spread-out kimonos. Typically, as in Untitled, 1985, they are covered with an obsessive, all-over rash of heavily impastoed, drippy dots. Far less theatrical but also keenly focused on subject matter and technique, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi creates blank...
...ART: From Japan, new work that defies tradition...
...first major U.S. museum show of contemporary Japanese art in more than two decades, artists look at nature and at the making of art in unexpected ways...
...ART DIRECTOR: Rudolph C. Hoglund...