Brown Bag Lunch and Lecture: Friday 18 May 12:15 – 1:15pm, RSVP requested
Artist Reception: Friday 18 May 2012, 5 – 8pm
Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present “Six Elements or More,” an exhibition featuring the works of New York-based artist Tadaaki Kuwayama. The works will be on view from May 18, 2012 through July 10, 2012. On Friday, May 18 at 12:15pm, Michael Klein, a private art dealer and independent curator from New York, will be speaking on Tadaaki Kuwayama and Minimalism at the gallery; a brown-bag lunch will be provided and RSVPs requested. From 5 to 8 p.m., on Friday 18 May, Tayloe Piggott Gallery will host an artist reception for Kuwayama’s exhibition. The public is welcome to meet the artist and view the works of Tadaaki’s first solo show at the Tayloe Piggott Gallery. Artist, Celia Gerard, will simultaneously hold her first solo show at the gallery.
Over the past five decades, Tadaaki Kuwayama has produced a significant body of work that addresses and makes use of the key principles and manifestations of Minimal art. His arrival in New York from his native Japan in the late 1950s put him in the center of the creative, social and political maelstrom that was the character of that time. He quickly joined the ranks of artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin who were spearheading aesthetic changes and new ideas about art. Together, Kuwayama and these artists shifted the direction of painting and sculpture, a shift that was to be a hallmark of American art then and for decades to come.
At the heart of Kuwayama’s work is a passion for color. In contrast to the painterly, dramatic style of Abstraction Expressionism Kuwayama’s paintings are dramatic in their presence, in their complete clarity and the richness of their color. Since the beginning, a painting’s color and its internal structure, have been at the core of his principles. While some painters compose brush in hand, Kuwayama builds his sequential works one unit at a time with the diligence and precision of an architect. Steadfastly monochromatic, the formula for these new works remains linked to his earlier works: single geometric elements that are repeated to form a larger whole composition. Still a colorist at heart, Kuwayama explores color and structure using anodized aluminum and other materials. The colors in his paintings are produced through a chemical process which dyes the surface of the aluminum so that the surface reflects color. The intensity and luminosity of that color changes as the light on the painting changes or as the viewer moves in front of the work. Each piece comprises a similar rhythm of parts and in this exhibition the systems are built on groupings of six units or more.
Tadaaki Kuwayama was born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1932. He received his B.F.A. in 1956 from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. In 1958 he moved to New York City, where he continues to live and work. Kuwayama, whose work has been associated with minimalist and reductive painting since his first one-person shows at the seminal Green Gallery in 1961 and 1962, was included in the 1966 “Systemic Painting” exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the 1979 “Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition” at the Albright-Knox Gallery. Retrospective exhibitions of Kuwayama’s work have recently occurred at the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum and the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan. Public Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, NY, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, and the Metropolitan Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
For further information regarding Tadaaki Kuwayama or the show, please visit us online at www.tayloepiggottgallery.com or contact us at 307.733.0555 or art@tayloepiggottgallery.com. Please RSVP for the Brown-Bag Lunch and Lecture by emailing art@tayloepiggottgallery.com.