ARTCOURT Gallery is pleased to present Small Works 1950s-2020, an exhibition of four artists formerly of the Gutai Art Association (“Gutai”, established in 1954 and dissolved in 1972) who continued their pursuits of ground-breaking means of expression long after.

In recent years, after the large-scale 2013 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Gutai has received further worldwide acclaim and their works have become more often included into exhibitions capturing post-war art in an international context.

Since opening in 2003, our gallery has focused on members of Gutai as international artists with ties to the Kansai area, such as Saburo Murakami, and have conveyed the activities of Gutai artists from here in Osaka to the world while also closely connecting them to their regional context. This exhibition will be centered on a group of small works that condense the lone sensibility opened up through Gutai by four artists with differing styles of art-making.

This exhibition will be a collaboration between the works by the four artists, blending the old with the new.
The show will be composed of works by Masatoshi Masanobu, carefully preserved by the estate over many years, including rare and precious canvas works from the 1950s and ’60s, and a selection of drawings never before exhibited; a range of works that were in the care of the Ryuji Tanaka estate, with a focus on his small pieces that show traces of various experimentation from the ’90s; and excellent works by Tsuyoshi Maekawa and Norio Imai from the 1970s as well as recent works.

Through the works of these artists who, in their practice, persisted in the “daring advance into the unknown world”* while upheld by an absolutely unbridled creative spirit, our hope is that this exhibition will be an opportunity to convey that supple energy.

*Yoshihara Jiro, “Gutai Art Manifesto”. Translated by Reiko Tomii. Originally published as “Gutai bijutsu sengen,” Geijutsu Shincho, no. 12 (December 1956): “Gutai places an utmost premium on daring advance into the unknown world.” http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/gutai/data/manifesto.html