Yuki Katsura- A FABLE

Exihition Outline

Yuki Katsura (1913-91), who in 1935 held a solo exhibit of collage works, was a pioneer among women artists. Her career of 60 years bridged the pre- and post-war periods. This exhibition, the first comprehensive survey of her work, will be held in her native Tokyo to commemorate the centennial of her birth.

Katsura's methodology of simultaneously pursuing tactile sensations in cork and fabric collages, detailed delineation in oils, and caricaturistic depiction caught the attention of Shuzo Takiguchi and Fujita Tsuguharu before the war as manifesting a highly distinctive approach to painting. Following the war, by applying her penetrating eye for society and people to allegorical depiction, she produced richly humorous works that encourage interpretations on multiple levels. Katsura continually fostered her own objectivity through travels and books, and her work is permeated throughout by multifaceted observation, cognizant of both the avant-garde and the everyday, critical analysis and laughter, and Japanese folk elements and the universal perspectives of the modern West. By slightly manipulating our perspective--viewing a fable's main character from the standpoint of its supporting character, for example, or rotating her completed painting 90 degrees or enveloping her subject in a membrane-like wrapping--she moves us to look anew at all we had taken for granted.

This exhibition presents Yuki Katsura's artistic world--which commutes freely across the boundaries between human beings, creatures, and objects by means of allegorical depiction--through her foremost paintings and also numerous artworks and book covers and illustrations never before exhibited. It endeavors to show, from varying angles, the significance of her work as art fostered in a different context from the Western avant-garde. Katsura's art, which developed within the complete freedom of her thinking and attitudes, startles and awakens us to the joy of discovering the world around us from new perspectives.

Exhibition Features

In Tokyo, Yuki Katsura's first comprehensive solo exhibition
From her first solo exhibit at age 21 to her exhibition of new works a half century later, Yuki Katsura continually commanded attention with her own distinctive art. Yet, she never obtained the opportunity to show her foremost works in one location in her native Tokyo. This time, viewers will see artworks from nearly every period of her career, both important works and works never before exhibited.

1 Early-period experimental works never before shown
Sketches of plants undertaken in her teens, lacquer paintings and collages produced in the 1930s, and hell scenes abounding with humor. through works never before publically displayed, the exhibition will trace back to pre-war Japan in order to understand how her three expressive methods. detailed delineation, collages that explore tactile sensations, and caricature works. originated and came to form.

2 The artist's engagement with society
In the 1940s and '50s, Katsura went outside to sketch Tokyo's townscapes and its people in daily life. In '54, when the Fukuryu Maru was contaminated by fallout from a nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, she produced Hito to Sakana (Man and Fish: Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art) and other important works addressing the realities of society. In this period, when Japan's publishing world resurged, she furthermore undertook allegorical depiction in oils for the covers and illustrations of children's books, such as Nonchan kumo ni noru ("Nonchan Rides on a Cloud"; author, Momoko Ishii) and Obaachan to kobuta ("The Old Woman and the Piglet"; author, Yaeko Nogami).

3 Long travels
From 1956 to '61, Katsura made long trips to Paris, Central Africa, and New York. Taking her sketchbook and camera in hand, she observed people's lives in many environments, compiling her experiences in an award-winning travel journal (Mainichi Publishing Culture Award). In New York, where Neo Dada seized her attention, she moved to a expansive studio and undertook in large scale the collages she given up during the war due to the difficulty of obtaining materials. The work Four Canvases, collected by an American art museum, will travel to Japan for the first time, for this exhibition.

4 Animal Fables
In the mid-sixties, Katsura won the grand prize of the Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan for her large-scale collage, Gombe and Crows, which looks at a well-known fable from the supporting character's perspective. Katsura saw the crow, who frustrates Gombe's patient hard work, as a symbol of destructive innovation, and she felt angered by perceptions of it as a metaphor for wasted effort. Using bird beaks and tenugui cloth to richly humorous effect, she critically examines the fable. In parallel with such large-scale paintings, she also gave terrific energy to creating book covers and illustrations for the works of cultural critic Kiyoteru Hanada, the fiction of James Baldwin and Minako Oba, and for an autobiography of the social entrepreneur, Miki Sawada. At that time, she sought to deepen her understanding of the social conditions faced by black people and women. In this period when Katsura penned many notable essays, creatures in membrane-like wrappings, signifying various meanings, came to appear in her works,

5 Red Silk Implements
In 1985, Katsura exhibited installations of objects wrapped in the red silk lining of kimono. The objects--implements used by women in daily life: a high pillow, a cooking pot, a bag, etc.--are ordinary in themselves, yet on closer inspection appear to be sprouting horns. Katsura, by enveloping everyday objects in wrappings of fabric or paper, animates them and makes them squirm to life. In her late years, her artwork took a new turn towards "living with the incongruities of life." By taking things in hand and seeking to understand life's unsettling aspects concretely, through the mediation of physical objects, she perhaps sought to renew her relationship with the world around her.