Ryuji Tanaka was a Japanese artist known for his reinterpretation of Nihonga or traditional Japanese painting. He was a member of two Japanese post-war avantgarde groups: Pan-real Art Association and the Gutai Art Association.
Read MoreTanaka enrolled at the Kyoto Municipal School of Painting in 1944 to study Nihonga. In response to the disintegration of traditional values in post-war Japan, the artist founded Pan-real Art Association in 1948, seeking to revitalise conservative Nihonga by incorporating new elements from Western-style painting. Co-founders of the group included Yamazaki Takashi and Mikami Makoto.
Tanaka's involvement with Pan-real Art Association was short-lived and he left after three years to pursue his own path. Like many of his contemporaries, Tanaka worked as a high school art teacher during the day, painting in his spare time. He continued to teach until his retirement in 1993. In the early 1960s, he developed a signature style of painting where he would load his canvas with mineral pigments and paint from the centre out, creating large expanses of colour against dark backgrounds. He favoured using feathers over paint brushes; this gave his paintings fuzzy forms such as the horizontal strip of muted green in Sei (3) (1962). 'Sei', which means 'living (in a house)' in Japanese, is the title of many Tanaka paintings. The artist's experimentation with natural materials led him to mix ore or pebbles in his pigments.
At the invitation of his friend, the artist Kazuo Shiraga, Tanaka began attending meetings at the Gutai Art Association in 1963; he was an official member by 1965. Founded the previous decade by the Osaka-based artist Jiro Yoshihara, the Gutai group was known for its radical approaches to material and technique. Remaining in the group until 1967, Tanaka used increasingly bright colours, as shown with the red that inundates a black hole in Kishi no Fudo (The Nature of the Knight) (1967), as well as thinly covering the canvas or panel with natural pigments and making abstract forms and scratches.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Tanaka continued to broaden his palette. As with his earlier experimentation with ore and pebbles, he began adding glass powder to his pigments to accentuate the blurry quality. In Nature '90 (In) (1990), for example, wide sweeps of yellow and blue cut across a black background and the overlapping colours take on a translucent green at the edges.
Tanaka exhibited mostly in Japan during his lifetime; in 2017, Simon Lee Gallery New York collaborated with the estate of the artist and Axel Vervoordt Gallery to organise the first solo exhibition of his work in the United States. Tanaka's works are in the collections of the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art; Osaka City Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, London.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2019
