Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Atsuko Tanaka: 1960 点と線の渦巻き at The Contemporary Art Gallery, Seibu Department Store, Tokyo, 19 April–15 May, 1985.

Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist best known for her Neo-Dada Electric Dress (1956), a garment made from hundreds of lightbulbs painted in primary colors. This iconic work, which she wore to exhibitions, functions as a conflation of Japanese traditional clothing with modern urbanization, bringing an unexpected and challenging interpretation to both. “I wanted to shatter stable beauty with my work,” Tanaka once said. A member of the Gutai movement, much of her work used domestic objects like lightbulbs, textiles, doorknobs, and doorbells. With these objects, the artist was able to create work about the body without a body present. She maintained a broad practice that included performance “happenings,” sculpture, and installation, while her later work focusing on two-dimensional painting, with colorful organic abstract shapes connecting circles and lines.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions; Etel Adnan at Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München and Etel Adnan: Poetry of Colors at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

It gathers artworks from all periods of the internationally renowned artist’s oeuvre and in a wide range of media. Side by side with her small-format abstract paintings, whose intensity of colour lends them an almost mystical quality, her monumental tapestries, delicate works on paper, leporellos, and experiments on film shed light on her specific engagement with questions of colour and form and with the cosmic dimension of time, space, and the spiritual.

The visionary paintings of Martin Wong, one of the unsung geniuses of New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s, are collected here and examined in depth for the first time. Entirely self-taught, Wong created intricate compositions that combine gritty social documents, cosmic witticisms, and highly charged symbolic languages-customised manual alphabets for the deaf, street graffiti, Nuyorican poetry, hand-lettered signs, meticulously rendered brick facades, rearrangements of Zodiac signs-sometimes within a single painting.

The urban landscape of Loisaida, the Hispanic section of the Lower East Side where Wong lived, is the source of his imagery. Whatever the theme-the survival of a neighbourhood besieged by drugs and crime, homoerotic fantasies of men in uniform, the multiplicity of meaning in language, the kitsch and ornamentation of Chinatown USA-Wong’s work is visually startling and movingly autobiographical.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.