About the Exhibition

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Karuizawa New Art Museum is pleased to announce an extension of the period of "Tsuyoshi Maekawa"exhibition which was open during Feb 8th-June 28th 2020. After replacing some works partially by other pieces (From June29th to July3rd the museum will be closed) because of its conservation the exhibition will be reopened from July 4th(sat), 2020 for the time being.
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Karuizawa New Art Museum is pleased to present the solo exhibition” TSUYOSHI MAEKAWA" from our series < Worldwide Artists of Asia with Continuous Evaluation from Today's Perspective> from February 8th, 2020 .

Maekawa, born in 1936 in Osaka, joined an avant-garde art group, "Gutai Art Association” in 1962 and acted as a center of the second generation of “Gutai”.
Maekawa focused on loosely woven thick cloth, “Dongoros”, a material for burlap sacks, and created an expression having elements of both a picture and a three-dimension art by setting torn and pleated “Dongoros” on a screen.

When “Gutai Art Association” was established, Jiro Yoshihara (1905-1972), a leader of the group, excluded narrativity accompanying artworks, and advocated an importance of a material itself. You can say that Maekawa is an artist who materialized a thought, “Gutai Art imparts life to matter”, the Gutai Art Manifesto * in 1956, carried by Yoshihara at that time.

Even after 1972, the year “Gutai” was dissolved, Maekawa consistently has concerned about materials and created artworks using various clothes, such as fine, thin and soft hemp cloth and cotton. Maekawa has also been a designer and left experimental artworks with excellent design. He has worked in a search for formation using shapes and colors. In recent years, he has used “Dongoros” again and developed a new phase of works by blending roughness of materials and sophisticated formation.

His works have been highly evaluated in the world. They are collected in museums in each country such as Tate Modern in Britain and received many awards.
In this exhibition, his recent works, created after 2000, including the latest works to be shown for the first time in public, are mainly introduced. The present days of Tsuyoshi Maekawa who actively continues his works even now are also introduced.

* Translated by Reiko Tomii. Originally published as “Gutai bijutsu sengen,” Geijutsu Shinchō 7, no. 12 (December 1956), pp. 202–04.


○ On the occasion of this exhibition, the text entitled "Why Do I Create Paintings?" written by Tsuyoshi Maekawa
○　Introduction by Director Eiichi Matsuhashi

〇Exhibited works'list
Period 1：2020.2.8（sat）－2020.6.28（sun）
Period 2：2020.7.4（sat）－The extended session has been closed on October 4!

〇MAEKAWA Exhibition on the web!
　Let's discover Maekawa's works!
　360°Gallery