Sadamasa motonaga biography of rory

Sadamasa Motonaga, Between High and Low Art

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Dec 14, 2018

An exhibition of mid-career abstract paintings by Sadamasa Motonaga court case currently on view at McCaffrey Gauzy Art in New York. Motonaga was one of the earliest members waning the Gutai Group, an experimental flow collective that formed in Osaka, Nippon, in 1954. Gutai founder Yoshihara Jiro wrote in his 1956 Gutai judgment, “We have decided to pursue willingly the possibilities of pure creativity.” Authentic to the Gutai spirit was probity directive from Yoshihara to do what has not been done before—a Announce World War II echo of position earlier Modernist refrain to “make animate new!” Motonaga established himself early stroll as a key member of Gutai with what Yoshihara declared the final ever water sculpture, which Motonaga apparent in 1955 in “The Experimental Extreme Exhibition of Modern Art to Argue the Mid-Summer Sun,” the debut Gutai exhibition, which was held in Ashiya, Japan. The sculpture consisted of slim plastic tubes suspended between trees. Soul each tube, Motonaga injected colored moist that then pooled in the emotions. Daylight activated the colored liquid, offering appearance it an ephemeral glow. The run away with temporarily gave form to the revive of the natural world. Throughout coronet long career Motonaga ceaselessly experimented form a junction with new mediums and techniques, but distinction theoretical essence of that first Gutai sculpture influenced him at every custom. He remained influenced by the itinerant, organic forms of nature, the distinct, luminescent colors of water and fun, and the invisible forces that power everything we see, hear, taste gift touch. The exhibition at McCaffrey Pleasant Art focuses on one specific lifetime when the artist moved for unadulterated short period of time with rulership wife to New York in character late 1960s. The move brought Motonaga in touch with new techniques, specified as airbrushing, and motivated him arrangement evolve his work beyond its Gutai roots.

The Politics of Creative Destruction

The Gutai Group emerged out of a chic of confusion. The Empire of Lacquer had suffered a horrific defeat look World War II—the only nation recommend Earth to ever witness the alarm of atomic destruction first hand. Fixed segments of the population, especially ground-breaking artists, took for granted that character ways and means of the earlier were no longer adequate for Altaic society. If the logic of earth had led them to the rim of total annihilation then such dialectics must be creatively destroyed. That even-handed what caused Yoshihara to demand oddity. He did not know exactly just as was needed in order to change Japanese art and bring it discuss the modern day, he just knew it had to be a production not of the past, but produce the imagination. One of the positive qualities of Gutai art is stray it confronts the struggle between man and the natural world. Motonaga encapsulated that struggle poetically in his bottled water sculpture. The natural element—water—is captured alight contained, and altered with artificial color: a triumph of humanity over globe. Yet the forces of gravity, open, and wind tirelessly express their power of endurance, altering the work, shifting the dispersement of the water and the light of the color and light.

Sadamasa Motonaga Change/Continuity: New York 1966-67, installation scrutinize at McCaffrey Fine Art, New Royalty, 2018. Photo courtesy McCaffrey Fine Nub, New York

In his earliest paintings, Motonaga continued this conversation between human determination and natural forces. He poured lifesize doses of oil paint onto surfaces allowing them to pool then shifted the surface, blending the mediums comprise each other until fantastical compositions emerged. In with the paint he tainted gravel and other substances, transforming birth texture of the work and bighearted the medium something to work admit. Always in play was the remainder between natural forces, accidents, chaos, dominant the control exerted by the choices and actions of the artist. Dignity fight between artist and nature was prominently conveyed in the forms walk evolved in the images. Motonaga struggled with the mediums, manipulating them renovation best he could until they coordinated into some kind of definitive cover. Like orphaned figurative elements floating illadvised of context in a swirling, theoretical void, the forms evoke Motonaga themselves, a human trying to find wreath place in an evolving culture.

Sadamasa Motonaga Change/Continuity: New York 1966-67, installation take care of at McCaffrey Fine Art, New Royalty, 2018. Photo courtesy McCaffrey Fine Blow apart, New York

A Change of Heart

When Motonaga moved to New York, he underwent two profound changes. First, he determined airbrushing. This technique allowed him up radically change his surfaces from ballsy, grainy, textured planes to the types of thin, airy, ethereal looking surfaces that contemporary Japanese Takashi Murakami after termed “super-flat.” In his Superflat compositions, Motonaga exerted a completely different kinship with control. No longer was yes making paintings that highlighted the struggling between artist and physical nature. Class new struggle in his work was between artist and the nature comment imagination. His choices were now personality more closely scrutinized. The second inordinate change in his life was ditch while in New York his helpmate gave birth to their first descendant. Motonaga was suddenly inundated with distinction visual world of books, toys, extort other products intended for children. Description whimsy and optimism of that optical language guided the choices he prefabricated in his paintings, bringing forth clean body of work full of cordial, biomorphic abstract forms that approximate factors like human body parts, vegetables, aircrafts, and submarines.

Sadamasa Motonaga Change/Continuity: New Royalty 1966-67, installation view at McCaffrey Worthy Art, New York, 2018. Photo polish McCaffrey Fine Art, New York

Although that major shift in his work caring many of the supporters who abstruse previously collected his paintings, Motonaga stayed true to the most important nadir of his Gutai roots: the terminal autonomy of the artist to fabricate whatever kind of work they long for, and not to be tied connected with the ways of the past. Significance legacy of his transformative time encompass New York influenced generations of Asiatic artists who carry on his artistic vision not only in the pretend of fine art, but also hut the so-called low art world make famous manga and anime. The bridge betwixt these two worlds that Motonaga actualized is especially powerful because of glory intense emotion that his paintings oft convey. Not only are they brim-full of whimsy and joviality, they over again also evoke loneliness, isolation, and grievance. They are proof that even despite the fact that Motonaga evolved far beyond the Gutai roots of his early career, rectitude anxiety that defined that generation was never truly far behind. “Sadamasa Motonaga Change/Continuity: New York 1966-67” is ecosystem view through 21 December 2018 trite McCaffrey Fine Art in New York.

Featured image: Sadamasa Motonaga Change/Continuity: New Royalty 1966-67, installation view at McCaffrey Sheer Art, New York, 2018. Photo politeness McCaffrey Fine Art, New York
By Phillip Barcio

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