Shusaku Arakawa’s “Diagrams for the Imagination” at Gagosian Gallery, New York
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The Gagosian Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition titled “Diagrams for the Imagination,” featuring the painterly, diagrammatic drawings by the Japanese architect and artist Shusaku Arakawa. The exhibition is on view through April 13, 2019. TheShusaku Arakawa’s “Diagrams for the Imagination” at Gagosian Gallery, New York
The Gagosian Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition titled “Diagrams for the Imagination,” featuring the painterly, diagrammatic drawings by the Japanese architect and artist Shusaku Arakawa. The exhibition is on view through April 13, 2019. The exhibition showcases works by Arakawa created between 1965 and 1984, and has been curated by Ealan Wingate, the director of Gagosian Gallery. Many of the works had been placed in storage in the late 1980s and have rarely been exhibited to the public since. Commenting about the artist, the gallery says, “Born in Japan in 1936, Arakawa was one of the founding members of the Japanese avant-garde collective Neo-Dadaism Organizers. He has often described himself as an ‘eternal outsider’ and an ‘abstractionist of the distant future.’ In 1961, he moved from Tokyo to New York. By the mid-1960s, his work had taken a pivotal turn with the ‘diagram paintings,’ which combine words with highly schematic images suggestive of blueprints. He began exhibiting at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles and New York, and was included in the now legendary 1967 exhibition ‘Language to be looked at and/ or things to be read.’ Over the decades that followed, Arakawa explored the workings of human consciousness, diagrammatic representation, and epistemology.” Describing the works presented at the exhibition, the gallery stated in its press release, “This exhibition examines the period during which Arakawa worked in two dimensions, using paint, ink, graphite, and assemblage on canvas and paper to demonstrate, what critic Lawrence Alloway called, ‘the logic of meaning, the texture of meaning.’ From the mid-1960s onward, Arakawa began to augment the simple topography of his diagrams with additional referents, sometimes engaging other sensory faculty or using prompts and instructions to make the viewing of painting into an active endeavor.” While the artworks were created before Arakawa’s architecture endeavors, which began in the 1990s, some of the paintings nod to architectural representations. In “A Couple” (1966-67), for instance, a bird’s-eye view of a bedroom is mapped out. The image shows only the places where the corresponding physical elements would be, had “a couple” been literally depicted. In Arakawa’s works, “signs and diagrammatic shapes such as cylinders, arrows, and concentric circles mingle with words and phrases, abstract and semiological signals come together on the canvas,” the gallery says. “Blank Lines or Topological Bathing” (1980-81), for instance, comprises four canvases: a color chart; a vision test chart; and two patterned, off-white canvases, one of which is stenciled with the words “THE PERCEIVING OF ONESELF AS BLANK.” Arakawa constructed these systems of words and signs to both highlight and investigate the mechanics of human perception and knowledge. In Arakawa’s work, the image is often merely a stimulus, as the ultimate act of representation is displaced from the canvas, or object, to the imagination of the viewer, opening up a gap between the eye and the mind. As Arakawa has stated, “Understanding is usually beside the point.”The exhibition is on view through April 13, 2019, at the Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10075.For details, visit https://gagosian.com https://www.blouinartinfo.com/ Founder: Louise Blouin Read more