ART FAIR TOKYO 2021

NUKAGA GALLERY is pleased to announce its participation in Art Fair Tokyo 2021.

The gallery has been hosting exhibitions of post-war women artists in efforts to highlight their avant-garde and unique artistic practices that have been overlooked, and one of the artists is Saori Akutagawa.

Born in 1924, Aichi prefecture, Japan. Akutagawa studied vocal music at university, and she began working with hand-dyed batik and oil painting in order to express herself while in a typically patriarchal marriage to a composer. In the 1950’s, being selected to feature her works in a group exhibition alongside artists such as Yayoi Kusama, and submitting pieces to the “Kyushitsu-kai” (Ninth Room Association), an avant-garde group within the “Nika-kai” (Second Section Association, a society of progressive Japanese artists), Akutagawa began to actively exhibit her works. While dutifully fulfilling her role as a housewife, she devoted herself to establish her unique style of self-expression as one individual. From her early years until her later life, she continuously created semi-abstract work based on the motif of “Woman,” which expresses uncontainable intense emotions that reside in her as an individual existence. Taking distance from the trend of the art scene, her colorful and free-spirited world view has received acclaim from art critics, including the famed artist, Taro Okamoto.

The oil paintings on exhibit at Art Fair Tokyo 2021 are pieces created after she moved to the United States. At a glance, it may seem that she had taken on the minimalist style, which was flourishing in those times, and suggest a new turn in her style of painting. However, the organic forms, powerful brushstrokes and the “matière” (texture) of dripped wax on canvas carries a feverish note that resonates with her early batik work, in which she freely expressed the deep emotions of a woman. However, in the midst of rising expectations towards her greater achievements, Akutagawa passed away due to pregnancy toxemia in January 1966, at the age of 42.

After her death, her work and talent were neglected for a long time. In the 1990s, Japanese public museums gradually began collecting her work, and since a major retrospective exhibition at multiple public museums in 2009 and group exhibition in MOMA, Akutagawa has become one of the Japanese women artists considered most worthy of critic’s reappraisal.

★More Information ⇒ http://artfairtokyo.com/