Saburo Murakami
Focus on the 70s



installation views (photo: Nobutada Omote)

12 November - 17 December , 2011
Opening hours : 11:00-19:00 (Saturdays -17:00), Closed on Sun., Mondays and National holidays
For downloading the press release, please click here.

// Talk // Friday, 25 November, 18:00-19:00
Norio Imai [Artist] x Yukio Fujimoto [Artist] x Tsukasa Ikegami [Curator, Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City]
// Reception // Friday, 25 November, 19:00-

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Exhibition Overview
As a core member of the Gutai Art Association (hereafter, Gutai) in the mid-'50s, Saburo Murakami (1925-1996) was dedicated to avant-garde attitudes such as critically deviating from various forms of expression of the past, expanding the creative framework, and producing new modes of art. At the same time, while continually pursuing a unique perspective in regard to the link between the self and the outside world, the act of creating art, and the relationship between the work and others, Murakami developed his own type of expression.

Murakami's highly diverse body of work ranges from the well-known "paper-breakthrough" (kami-yaburi) performances and "ball-throwing paintings" (tokyu-kaiga), and the many paintings he created during the late '50s and '60s, to the series that emerged in the '70s following Gutai's breakup which recalls conceptual art and makes use of a minimal technique. His work exudes an enigmatic air that seems impossible to grasp with a single interpretation while conveying a penetrating impression that seems to be lined with a consistent philosophy and fixed methodology. By appearing to contain a single underlying thesis in the overall display or creating the sense that the exhibition in itself was intended as a single work, Murakami's series of solo shows in the '70s in particular indicate that the artist's specific concerns were embodied in an increasingly lucid form.

Focusing on the seven solo shows that Murakami held between 1971 and 1977, this exhibition looks back at a period in the artist's career that has received relatively little attention in comparison to his work of the Gutai era. We have adopted a multifaceted approach in order to examine the content of each exhibition and trace Murakami's production activities at the time through his own handwritten memos and notes, photographs, and the works and objects which were created according to certain rules established before or during each event. Moreover, by presenting
some ten newly restored paintings created between the early '50s and the late '70s, documentary footage of a "paper breakthroughs" dating to the early Gutai era, reedited versions of performances and an interview from the late '80s and early '90s as well as the aforementioned works and materials from the '70s, we hope to provide viewers with an opportunity to reconsider and reexamine the life and ideas Murakami pursued throughout his approximately 50-year career, problems related to the creation of art, and the methodologies that underlie the creative expressions that he developed and transformed in a variety of ways.
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Picture caption;
A performance in which Murakami erased visitors' names from the exhibition guest book immediately after they had been written.
From the solo exhibition: Dislike for the principle of Identity* in '77. Photo by Hideo Natsutani
*Murakami's own English translation of the exhibition title was Displeasure by the Principle of Identity.

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Genta Ishizuka
Drifting Boundaries


installation views (photo: Nobutada Omote)


1 October - 29 October , 2011
Opening hours : 11:00-19:00 (Saturdays -17:00), Closed on Sundays, Mondays and holidays
Artist : Genta Ishizuka
// Reception // 1 October, 15:00-
// Talk // 8 October, 15:00-16:00 Atsuo Yamamoto(curator, Arts & Culture Division Hyogo Prefecture) x Genta Ishizuka
Surface Linkage, 2011, urushi,wire,cloth (photo: Nobutada Omote)

Genta Ishizuka (1982-), who is an emerging artist working through his own methodology while on the basis of traditional urushi (Japanese lacquer) techniques, explores the inseparable and fundamental relationship between the existences of the things and our experience of their perception.
The viewers will discover the lacquered surface filled with the material strength where layer upon layer of very careful handiwork processes are condensed and at the same time, the immaterial phenomena of emerging gloss and contrasted darkness there. The conspicuity of these both elements contendingly stand out on their perception because the forms, two-dimensionalities and three-dimensionalities, of lacquered surfaces and lacquered images are dexterously converted, fluctuated and crossed. Then the viewers’ senses are gradually led to the perceptual question about the objects as drifting the multi-layered boundaries of existence / in-existence, 2D / 3D and ‘here’ / ‘there’, that overlap and separate, and sometimes replace for each other.This time, we will present several series of new and evolved works by the artist, that include ‘Doubled depth’ where three-dimensional images are placed on reflections on a flat or curved surface.
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Left: Scanning of coordinate 2010, urushi,plywood,washer,lead of mechanical pencil, Ø90 ×d3cm Photo by Nobutada Omote
Right: An unknown vanishing point 2010, urushi,KANSHITSU-technique, h27×Ø56cm

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Akira Yanagisawa
Painting as a System


untitled(tangled) 2011, 145.5×112cm, Acrylic on panel

July 2 - July 30, 2011
11:00-19:00(Saturdays and July 10 Sun. -17:00)
Closed on Sundays and Mondays (*Opened : July 10 Sun.)
reception : July 2 Sat. 15:00-17:00
Artists : Akira Yanagisawa

Painting as a System : Harboring the sense that producing painting as “self-expression” arising from direct, subjective acts of portrayal, in which the painter paints while gazing on and contemplating the object, would be inapplicable in today’s world where everything is systematized, Akira Yanagisawa is engaged in dismantling all the formal attributes and formats of conventional painting and setting up efficiently structured, multi-stage mechanical production processes, and by interposing aspects of uncertainty and his own corporeality, he presents a world of paintings that act as fluidly generative systems. The images are obtained by computer according to a fixed set of rules, whereby regular and irregular variations are applied to perspective-derived lattice structures and abstract geometrical shapes. After undergoing a procedure of pouring and fixing acrylic paints onto panels masked with pattern paper, the images are then transferred as layers of paint, or on occasion, converted and reproduced into cut-out sticker-sheets or acrylic boards that are precut using specialized equipment. Interposing his own body, even as he sets up an imagery of fixed materials that is extracted in single cross-sections from a ceaseless flow of formative changes and implicit with infinite variations, Yanagisawa’s process is one that is steeped in wavering and contradiction. That process, and its bipolar output, which is his “painting as a system”, can be regarded as paradoxically exposing the painterly conditions of painting itself, and also as unraveling from inside-out the contradictory situation in which we live, with our flesh-and-blood bodies in this highly informatized world, and silently posing possibilities for opening the way to a new phase of being. (text by ACG)


Installation view (photograph:Tomas Svab)

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Yutaka Funai retrospective




June 7 - June 25, 2011
11:00-19:00(Saturdays -17:00)
Closed on Sundays and Mondays



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