ADAA The Art Show - Lévy Gorvy

ADAA The Art Show

New York, Park Avenue Armory
March 4 - 8, 2015

Tsuyoshi Maekawa (b. 1936) was a member of the Gutai Art Association, Japan’s most significant avant-garde collective of the postwar era, founded in 1954. He was included in the 8th Gutai Exhibition at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in 1959, and became a protégé of the group’s founder, Jirō Yoshihara. The first solo exhibition of Maekawa’s work was held at the Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka in November 1963. From that point until the group’s eventual dissolution following Yoshihara’s death in 1972, Maekawa was represented in every Gutai event.

For the 27th Annual Art Show, Dominique Lévy Gallery (Booth C6) will present a selection of paintings by the artist from the early 1960s, conveying both his unique sensibility and the remarkable energy of Gutai’s most productive period.

Maekawa’s efforts during this time were profoundly occupied with the materiality and three-dimensionality of painting. The artist created a series of works using burlap, cutting the fabric apart and adhering it to canvas, which he then painted over to create a rich, heterogeneous, metamorphic surface. Here, Maekawa made the radically objective nature of painting emerge in all its strangeness. This artistic practice served to subvert the representational, opening an immediate access to the thing itself—the artwork as matter rather than image. Although these works find their place in a lineage of paintings created using unconventional materials such as burlap, as in the work of Joan Miró, Paul Klee and Alberto Burri, they also stand apart as evidence of a highly independent investigation into abstract texture and the visual relationship of the fluid materiality of the artistic medium with topographic and biomorphic forms.

Literally meaning “concrete,” the word Gutai was intended by Yoshihara to express the idea that art constitutes the embodied, material manifestation of human spiritual freedom. While often closely associated with the contemporaneous movements of Abstract Expressionism in the United States and of Art Informel in France because of a shared exploration of performative painting, the multidisciplinary practice of Gutai artists pushed the boundaries between painting and performance, artwork and event, to such a degree that Allan Kaprow would praise the group as the pioneering force of the concept of the “happening” in Japan.

Tsuyoshi Maekawa has recently participated in a number of important exhibitions, including solo presentations at Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York, and Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp in 2014; as well as group exhibitions such as Gutai: Splendid Playground, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013; Tàpies: The eye of the artist, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2013; Art Osaka 2013, Hotel Granvia, Osaka, 2013; Gutai: The Spirit of an Era, The National Art Center Tokyo, 2012; Nul = 0, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2011; Gutai Retrospective, Prefectural Museum of Art, Hyogo, 2004; and Gutai, Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris, 1999. His works can be found in several public collections, including: The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, Japan; and Tate Modern, London.

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