Yoshimi Arts is pleased to announce we are holding Katsuo Tachi’s sixth exhibition, “Katsuo Tachi 2008”, at our gallery.

Between conceptual art, minimal art and new painting, Katsuo Tachi chose to work predominantly with painting, as he believed it to be the best representative of the physicality of the body, and he continued painting until 2008, just before his death. His works show significant change and development despite the brevity of his career. From the beginning of 1990’s, organic entities began to appear in his paintings which are best described as insects, seemingly totally at odds with the purely abstract paintings of oil-colors on a more materialistic tone that he had been producing until that time. 

Katsuo Tachi’s parents had been running an apiary, and as the Tachi family travelled with their bees in search of flowers all over the country, so he spent his childhood observing firsthand the transitions of the seasons, and the rhythms of the day, which would all later inform his style for creating abstract representation of insects. Around the mid 1990’s, the insect-like motif began to dissolve, and the structure of his images began to emerge on the entire canvas, and the sudden appearance of a spherical presence created a cosmic space within the painting. Upon entering the 2000s, this motif which seem to embody intense ideas about the nature of life transformed into as an abstract organism within the wide blank spaces of his paintings. It was as if the blank space were allowing a place in time where that organism could drift near us to take form as something finite. The blank spaces were brushed with faint pearl colored paint which made us feel a slight materialistic texture, up until 2006. But from 2007 the organic motif still continued to grow, and he stopped applying any color to the blank spaces, and it seemed to develop a space where we cannot identify whether the flow of time was present or not. 

He was diagnosed with cancer in March 2007 and was given only six months to live in the summer. Rather than being hospitaized for treatment, he chose to create his paintings in consultation with his doctor. He continued to work in his studio until December 30, 2008, and he passed away in January 2009.

In this exhibition, we will exhibit about 5 works in 2008, which was the last year of his work, including works borrowed from the collectors.