Gary Snyder Gallery is pleased to announce Tadaaki Kuwayama, an exhibition of four site-specific works in titanium, aluminum, Mylar and Bakelite at 529 West 20th Street, opening on January 19, 2012. The main gallery will be configured to contain two distinct installations: Untitled (1992/2012), a horizontal line of twenty-two red aluminum elements that wrap around a corner, and Untitled (2012), eight pink titanium panels standing vertically on the floor at alternating angles. This is the first work Kuwayama has made in this material. The south gallery will feature Untitled (1996/2012), a set of six Mylar sheets bisected by a thin line of red and blue graphite, and Untitled (1992/2012), eight panels of finely grooved, pale pink and yellow Bakelite.

This exhibition follows acclaimed museum shows of Kuwayama’s work in Japan and the United States. His retrospective, Out of Silence, held at the Nagoya City Art Museum in 2010, presented work ranging from early 1960s monochrome canvases to a recent floor-installation of alternating silver and gold aluminum cylinders. In 2011, Untitled – Tadaaki Kuwayama, his solo show at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, consisted of five site-specific installations, including a ring of nine-foot-tall anodized aluminum panels in one of the museum’s interior courtyards. The following June, the National Museum of Art in Osaka presented White, for which the artist installed sixty works, including three series of white paintings on handcrafted washi paper. In 2009, Kuwayama’s Untitled (1962) was included in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, and is currently on display in Surface, Support, Process: The 1960s Monochrome in the Guggenheim Collection. In November this year, Kuwayama will have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama, Japan, and in early 2013 he will show at the Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, South Korea.

Born in Nagoya in 1932, Tadaaki Kuwayama studied nihonga painting at the Tokyo National University of Art. Dissatisfied with the constraints of traditional practice, he and his wife, the artist Rakuko Naito, moved to New York City in 1958. He soon developed a minimalist aesthetic, which at first consisted of two vivid colors juxtaposed in horizontal and vertical compositions, as well as monochromatic panels divided by thin strips of chrome. In 1961 and 1962, he had solo exhibitions at the famed Green Gallery, which showcased other influential artists of the day, including Ralph Humphrey, Dan Flavin, and Robert Morris. Kuwayama’s work attained broad recognition, and was featured in the Guggenheim Museum’s legendary Systemic Painting exhibition in 1966.

Since the 1960s, Kuwayama has had solo exhibitions at many prestigious and influential galleries, including: Green Gallery (1961, 1962, New York), Tokyo Gallery (1967, Tokyo), Galerie Bischofberger (1967, 1968, Zürich), Gallery Yamaguchi (1985, 1989, 1993, 1997,
2001, 2005, 2010, Osaka), Nagoya City Art Museum (1990, Nagoya), Satani Gallery (1990, 1992, 1996, Tokyo), and GARY SNYDER Project Space (2008, New York). During this period his work was also featured in numerous landmark museum exhibitions, such as Vormen van de Kleur (1966–1967, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Kunst wird Material (1982, Nationalgalerie Berlin), Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present (2004, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofía, Madrid), and The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (2009, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). In 1985, the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art held his first retrospective in Japan.

Kuwayama’s work is featured in the collections of over forty major museums, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Hiroshima City Museum of Art; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Chiba; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nagoya City Art Museum; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; the Stiftung für Konstructive und Konkrete Kunst, Zürich; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Gary Snyder Gallery is pleased to represent Tadaaki Kuwayama.

Tadaaki Kuwayama will be on view at Gary Snyder Gallery, 529 West 20th Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues), through Saturday, February 25, 2012. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.