Yoshimi Arts is pleased to announce that the gallery will be participating in “Art Fair Tokyo” to be held at the Tokyo International Forum. Yoshimi Arts has been selected again for the “Galleries” section of the fair, and will be showing the works of Shigeru Izumi at the booth.
Shigeru Izumi is an artist representative of post-war Osaka. In 1951, he founded the Democratic Artists Association with Ei-Q, to create a framework for democratic art. In 1959 he went to New York, and his work shifted from his surrealistic narrative style to an abstraction of the peacock, which was a recurring motif in his work. In 1963 he moved to France, where he focused even more on abstraction and matiere, while also completing his blue work, which sought to create painting through automatic means. This stoic production continued throughout his lifetime, allowing him to achieve an advanced level of abstract painting which differed from the expressionist style of Japanese artists during that time.
In this exhibition we will be presenting works from his blue series created in France in 1963, his large-scale work from 1994, created as if his intention was to simply enjoy after all his years of thorough experimentation, and works showing the progression between the two moments in his career. The Gutai Movement is often the focal point of post-war Japanese art, but there have been several peripheral movements, artists, and groups, and this exhibition seeks to revisit these.