Yoshishige Furukawa - Maus Contemporary

“I am most interested in developing a visual space with color and forms on a visual plane. I start with the physical materials that a painter uses and then make changes based on intuition and on my reactions to the forms and colors present. When I am out walking, I may see a road, a construction site, working people, a tree, or the sky, and I try to incorporate the feeling of these visual physical things in my work. All of them have the power to cause me to ponder the relationship between the physical shape or material and mental reaction. Other influencing factors include the weather or conditions affected by time, body or even the sound of wind.”

- Yoshishige Furukawa, 1997

Japanese artist Yoshishige Furukawa’s paintings shown on this page date from the 1960’s to the mid-1970s, created while living in New York, where the artist moved to from Japan in 1963.

The selection of works includes examples of the artist’s 1960s dot paintings, followed by work clearly showing a shift in the artist’s practice - from a traditional, paint-based, to a process-based, minimalist approach, which ultimately culminates in the artist’s series of process-based object paintings from 1972 to 1976. The non-color of black and the solid sense of the materials used such as canvas or rubber, reflect a rather reticent and ascetic impression of 1970’s art. Despite this, the various variations that were woven by the often geometric forms, continued to evoke dynamic senses of motion and expression that were alike in appearances but different in nature from the regularly repetitive element inherent to Minimalism.

Yoshishige Furukawa (b. 1921 in Fukuoka, Japan; d. 2008 in Kanagawa, Japan) earned his BFA in painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts) in 1943. He moved to the United States in 1963, and spent the subsequent decades between the United States and his native Japan.

Furukawa’s work was the subject of two major retrospectives at the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art in 1992 and 2015, and his work is included in numerous important Japanese Museum collections, including the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo; the Osaka National Museum of Art in Osaka; the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto; the Fukuoka Art Museum in Fukuoka; the Kitakyushu Museum of Art; the Saitama Museum of Modern Art in Saitama; and the Saga Prefectural Art Museum; amidst others.
His work has been exhibited in the U. S. and Japan throughout his life, including the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, NY in 1991.

He’s the recipient of numerous important grants, twice from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1990 and 1997).

Yoshishige Furukawa spent his career testing the limits of painting through a dedicated engagement with American art trends and unconventional materials. beta pictoris gallery is thrilled to present works from Furukawa’s Black Rubber Sheet series, a body of work which began and evolved through the 1970s.

A formal evolution is evident in a chronological examination of the works from Furukawa’s Black Rubber Sheet series. The earliest paintings are monochrome yet playful due to Furukawa’s use of rough-hewn geometric shapes, where edges of appliquéd canvas are allowed to fray, and grommets and the heads of nails run a wavering line across the composition. White paint unifies these elements while highlighting their forms; as time progresses, however, Furukawa rejects this whitewashing in order to showcase the inherent colors and textures of his materials. Raw canvas ripples across these picture planes, alongside sheets of rubber whose uneven surfaces, flaws, and rips are elevated into artistic gestures. The anthropomorphic aspect of these works becomes increasingly evident as the series progresses: peachy-pink canvas resembles skin; a crevice formed between grommet-pinched sheets of rubber appears like a corset.

Furukawa wrote in 1997 that, “I am most interested in developing a visual space with color and forms on a visual plane…When I am out walking, I may see a road, a construction site, working people, a tree, or the sky, and I try to incorporate the feeling of these visual physical things in my work. All of them have the power to cause me to ponder the relationship between the physical shape or material and mental reaction.” In the Black Rubber Sheet series, Furukawa’s experience of the 70s—New York City streets, Minimalist art—is distilled into these evocative works, which gesture at many things while remaining ambiguous, and a bit coy.

Japanese artist Yoshishige Furukawa’s paintings shown in the Black Rubber Sheet exhibition date from 1972 to 1976, and are part of, or relate to, the artist’s important and rare black-rubber-sheets series created while living in New York, where the artist moved to from Japan in 1963. The non-color of black and the solid sense of the material of rubber reflected a rather reticent and ascetic impression of 1970’s art. Despite this, the various variations that were woven by the black geometric forms in triangles, squares and polygons continued to evoke dynamic senses of motion and expression that were alike in appearances but different in nature from the regularly repetitive element inherent to Minimalism.
Furukawa’s Oeuvre was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art. The paintings shown here were included in said retrospective, and several of them are included in the exhibition’s publication.