Tadanori Yokoo "A La Maison de M. Civecawa," Silkscreen on paper, 1965, 40.94 x 29.02 in.

Tadanori Yokoo "The Aesthetics of End"

A towering influence on the evolution and iconography of Japanese contemporary art, Yokoo has straddled the worlds of commercial and fine art since the 1960s. As a designer, his bold use of collage, psychedelia and appropriation of popular cultural icons - both Japanese and Western - created a new visual language for the turbulent, youth-charged 1960's. As a focal point of the Japnese avant-garde, which included filmmaker Akiro Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima, Yokoo's own work and collaborations with his peers generated an indigenous visual language and helped define post war Japan as an international cultural force.

The Aethetics of End, from which the exhibition's title is derived, is a silkscreen-poster created for a seminal essay by Yukio Mishima. As with many of Yokoo's works, its kaleidescopic fusion of the surreal and the hyperreal, the borrowed and the imagined, simultaneously illustrates the dreamlike and intensely metaphorical qualities of Mishima's writing as well as the tumultuous spirit of the radical 60's. Drawing on the principals of traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e and Nishiki-e prints, Yokoo's work managed to be both radical and accessible to a modern Japanese and international audience. Yokoo's appropriation of imagery from consumer and popular culture and his emergence during the American pop movement have linked his work to artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. It is difficult to imagine the extraordinary rise of popular Manga or the cultural force of Murakami's Superflat phenomenon without Yokoo's influence on the visual language of his time.
(text from Friedman Benda Gallery)

Exhibition Info
Date: Apr 24, 2010 - May 19, 2010
Place:Friedman Benda Gallery
Address: 515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001