Galerie Grand Siècle is going to launch the solo exhibition of Tadaaki Kuwayama From the 60s Till Today at 18:00 on July 29th and the exhibition ends on September 4th. Post-war art in Japan, in the context of globalization, has broken the language barriers, gaining reassessment and deserved respects in global art history. Born in 1932, Tadaaki Kuwayama, now 84 years old, moved to New York since 1958, is the active pioneer of American minimalism with Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. After the debut exhibition in NY’s legendary Green Gallery in1961, he established his name walking stride ahead into the avant-garde flow. He dedicates his career in ground-breaking tasks in logicalizing visual expression through geometry, repetitiveness, linearity, form, formlessness and the revolving echo among them. The concept of his artworks leads to the sense of endlessness, bringing audience an experience of tranquility and transcendence.

The end of 1950s in Japan, faced with the initial introduction of Euro-American abstract expressionism, Tadaaki Kuwayama took on another path, minimalistic painting, spray painting, monochromatic painting and beyond, persistently carving out new possibility and definition on materials for art creation. In 1990s, he inaugurated his specified context referring to surrounding environment and phenomena which utilized compounded heterogeneous materials to create the quasi-metallic objects with orders randomly altered according to varied exhibition spaces, angles of light incidence, and directions of audience movements (in special cases, the objects will be re-designed and re-created) to place all-day mutably view with inorganic characteristics. This way the work itself would liberate the artist from subjective expression; moreover, it also facilitated him to persistently develop the pioneering concepts interpreted as minimalism later.

Tadaaki Kuwayama will exhibit two series in Galerie Grand Siècle— the renowned painting series during 1960s to 1970s in its outer chamber and the recent work in its inner chamber. The former series incorporates the combination of monochromic high-saturated colors embedded with aluminum or chrome strips, following human natural instinct for symmetry. By trivializing the spatial context, composition and meaning, the artist eliminated his ego from the work. The latter work is shaped by geometrical arrangement of titanium anodized by monochromatic color schemes, letting color and space be the pure connections with the strange outer world in terms of decentralization. When the audience’s intuitive perceptions are widely accepted, the exhibition space itself becomes the subject, instead of the agent.

Two important guest speakers will participate the opening night July 29th to give lectures— Michio Hayashi (art critic) and Takashi Yamaguchi (director of Gallery Yamaguchi Kunst-Bau). Mr. Michio Hayashi is the authoritative specialist in post-war art in Japan who has kept concerns of the artist and published <Poetic of radical neutrality – the work of Tadaaki Kuwayama>. Mr. Takashi Yamaguchi started presenting the artist since 1985 and continued co-organizing the exhibitions of the artist until now. There will be a English-Mandarin interpreter onsite.

Brief file of Tadaaki Kuwayama

The artist was born in 1932 in Nogoya, graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music majoring in Nihonga in 1956. Then he moved to New York living and working there since 1958 until present.

In 1961, his debut exhibition was launched in Green Gallery. Since then, he continuously executed exhibitions in the U.S., Germany and Japan, including Galerie Reckermann in Cologne, Sakura Gallery and Akira Ikeda Gallery in Japan, Galerie Renate Bender in Munich, and Gallery Yamagui in Japan in chronological order. In the same time, numerous invitations from museums came up. To list a few of his museum-setting exhibitions: A Retrospective 1960-1985 at Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (1985), The 1961 Pittsburg International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute (1961), Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1966), Project’96 at Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art (1996), Samadhi at Chelsea Art Museum (2002), Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (2004), Untitled: Taadaki Kuwayama at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (2011) and White – Tadaaki Kuwayama – Osaka Project at National Museum of Art (2011).

In the early stage of the artist’s career, 1969, he received the honor of Art in America New Talent by National Endowment of the Arts in the U.S. and in 1986 awarded by Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. There are more than 50 museums around the world having collected his artworks, say, most in the U.S. and Japan, many in Germany, and also the national museums in Switzerland, Austria and Denmark.