TSUYOSHI MAEKAWA

b. 1936 Osaka, Japan

Lives and works in Sasayama, Japan

 

Tsuyoshi Maekawa was a key figure in the 'second generation' of the Gutai Art Association (1954-1972), Japan's avant-garde collective of the postwar era. Founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara and 16 other young Osaka-area artists, Japan’s Gutai movement managed to achieve international renown — featured in LIFE magazine and 'Art Informel' — even as its activities were still unfolding.

 

Maekawa began experimenting with burlap as a material support in 1954, before his involvement in Gutai, by stretching found rice bags or worn-out sacks over canvas. He would apply oil paint to this fabric, using its rough natural character to draw attention to the work’s materiality. The variegated surface texture results in a fascinatingly strange, metamorphic object. Although Maekawa exhibited canvases covered with burlap as early as 1959, when he participated in the 8th Gutai Art Exhibition not as a member of Gutai, it was not until his first solo exhibition at the Gutai Pinacotheca in November 1963 that Maekawa showed works made using his signature pleating and manipulation of the coarse cloth material.

 

Aware that the material had previously been used by avant-garde artists such as Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Alberto Burri, Maekawa was pushed to further test the limits of burlap by the experimental and highly original community of Gutai. He began sewing the fabric, ripping and tearing the fibrous threads apart, and using glue to manipulate the surface, seeking to do something with the material that had never been done before. Although Maekawa’s early work is reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism, his primary preoccupation was with the work's objectness. Rather than an investigation of action or an expression of emotion, he was focused on discovering new structural possibilities. His work has a raw materiality, yet maintains the feeling of a painting. The relief-like surface’s gracefully meandering lines repeat organically, reminiscent of the rhythm of the natural world, geological structures of the earth, and biological phenomena. Viewing these works can be likened to the experience of observing a winding riverbed or the veins of leafy plants.

 

Both the Osaka National Museum of Art and the Japanese National Museum have collected large numbers of Maekawa’s burlap works of the early 1960s. Other Gutai-era paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art. Likewise, the Tate Modern recently acquired a painting from 1963 entitled Lateral Swellings. Such works are emblematic of Maekawa’s unique sensibility, and are considered to be central works in Gutai’s most productive period.