Artist: Usami Keiji
Date: 1997
Museum: Sezon Museum of Modern Art (Karuizawa, Japan)
Technique: Oil On Canvas
Born in Osaka in 1940, Keiji Usami was an artist representing the Japanese contemporary art scene. Usami began to teach himself painting, and he started systematic creation of paintings by employing four human figures taken from a news photograph of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, circles and gradation. In 1966, Usami’s work was exhibited in The New Japanese Paintings and Sculpture at MoMA in NY. In 1968, Usami unveiled LASER=BEAM=JOINT, the first work in Japan using laser beam. His work from the same series exhibited in Japan World Exposition, Osaka 1970 received attention. Usami continued producing his works both in Japan and abroad, including those exhibited at the Venice Biennale 1972. The four symbolized human figures, which Usami repeatedly used and transformed, became his lifelong motif to compose paintings as “thinking space” for people of the same era and their world experience. Usami wrote a number of books and practiced his art theory described in the books in creating paintings. 25 years after Ghost Plan No.1 (1969), Usami transformed the pictorial space of symbolized human figures into a cosmic space. All figurations on the canvas are in movements to link in many different manners, destroy original figurations, and generate new forms. The cosmic space repeating generation and destruction develops in the painting.
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