Sizzle and Chill
Rakuko Naito and Tadaaki Kuwayama were born and raised in Japan. They studied nihonga in art school, the traditional form of Japanese painting on paper or silk using natural pigments. They married and moved to the United States in 1958, which is when other notable Japanese artists, such as Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono, also moved to the US.
Living and working in New York, Naito and Kuwayama moved away from traditional Japanese painting and the gestural Abstract Expressionist painting that dominated the art world at that time. In the 1960s, both artists went in similar, yet distinct directions with respect to their art making practices. Initially using oil paints and then later acrylic, metallic and spray paints with tape and hard edges, Naito removed the artist's hand to create flat, optical paintings that explored visual perception. These paintings were vibrating and eye-popping with bold colors, crisp edges and dizzying patterns. Tadaaki also used acrylic paints and removed the artist's hand from his painting, but his work was more reductive and explored large geometric blocks of brightly colored paints. Later, he began to divide the canvas into squares and rectangles that were framed with aluminum and industrial materials and reassembled into a single structure. His surfaces were pristine and the shapes were repeated perfectly like building blocks. There was and continued to be a cool, reductive and serene quality to his artwork.
Rakuko Naito’s work is held in the Miami-Dade Community College, Miami, Florida; Kemper Art Collection, Chicago; Roland Gibson Art Foundation, State University of New York at Potsdam, New York; and Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Massachusetts. She was an artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 2003. She continues to explore the possibilities of different materials, and in her recent works she frequently uses Japanese paper.
Kuwayama has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as Green Gallery (1965, 1966); Tokyo Gallery (1967); Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich (1967); Museum Folkwang, Essen, West Germany (1974); Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1976); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, Japan (1980, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1988); Nagoya City Art Museum (1989, 2006, 2010); Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany (1997); and National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011). His work has been presented in such group exhibitions as Systemic Painting, Guggenheim Museum (1966); Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1979), which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1980), Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute (1981), and Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (1981); and The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, Guggenheim Museum (2009). He won a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1969) and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant (1986).
Tadasky (110° view)
Tadasky (Tadasuke Kuwayama) was born in Nagoya, Japan. He came to the United States on a scholarship to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI in 1961. Tadasky's first stop was New York where he decided to stay. Tadasky transferred his scholarship to the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York, then a locus of study for Japanese immigrants.
Tadasky's primary body of work, begun in the early 1960s, features compositions of concentric circles that trigger optical color interaction and explore sensory stimulation. They are highly calculated and precisely created, consisting of thin, pulsating, vibrantly colored lines that seem to whirl and radiate outward from the center. Tadasky uses a special wheel adapted from a traditional Japanese technique that allows him to paint each ring perfectly.
Philip Johnson was among Tadasky's earliest supporters, purchasing a painting in 1964 and introducing Tadasky's work to fellow architects and curators. A painting by Tadasky appeared in the December 11, 1964 edition of Life magazine in an article titled Op Art: A dizzying fascinating style of painting. The Museum of Modern Art purchased the featured work, A-101, 1964, as well as B-171, 1964 for its permanent collection. Other early museum collectors were the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Gallery (purchased 2 works), the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (purchased by James J. Sweeney), and the Phoenix Art Center. Private collectors include Harry Abrams, Seymour Knox, Frederick Weisman, David Rockefeller, and James Michener.
Tadasky's first New York dealer was the prestigious Kootz Gallery which held solo exhibitions in 1964 and 1965. Tadasky also had solo exhibitions in Japan in 1966 at the Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo and at the Gutai Pinacotheca, Osaka. Tadasky then had two solo exhibitions at Fishbach Gallery in 1967 and 1969.
Tadasky participated in seminal Op Art exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art's The Responsive Eye and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's Kinetic and Optic Art Today both in 1965. The following year, the Museum of Modern Art included Tadasky in its exhibition The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture which traveled to 7 other museums across the country. Tadasky's bright, multicolored compositions were an instant success with the public; in 1968, Springbok Editions manufactured a circular jigsaw titled Whirling Disks by Tadasky.
Tadasky's work was strongly featured in the Columbus Museum of Art exhibition The Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s with seven works illustrated in the exhibition catalogue. Tadasky's Sixties paintings were also included in Extreme Abstraction at the Albright-Knox Gallery in 2005. Tadasky was recently included in the exhibition Resounding Spirit: Japanese Contemporary Art of the 1960s organized by the Gibson Gallery at SUNY Potsdam which traveled to the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.