Himeji City Museum of Art presents a major retrospective featuring over 200 paintings, 30 works on paper and 100 notebooks by one of Gutai’s youngest members, Onoda Minoru (1937 – 2008) until June 20, 2021. The exhibition curator Misato Fudo worked closely with the artist’s family to present a selection of works culled from various Japanese museums, private collections and the artist’s estate. His personal notebooks which have never been exhibited until now are also on view.
Watashi no Maru / A Theory of Propagation Painting, will open on Saturday, April 10th and be on view in Himeji, Japan, until June 20th 2021. An accompanying catalog published by Seigensha features essays in English and Japanese by Prof. Shoichi Hirai, Eric Shiner, Dr. Reiko Tomii, Koichi Wada and an interview with the artist’s son, Isa Onoda. Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie is thrilled to have been able to assist in this retrospective.
Early paintings from the late 1950s showing rural scenes are followed by abstract works with pipes, plaster, sand and the first representation of the circle. Seminal paintings include works experimenting with the circle, gofun, organic propagation, circle proliferation, toward the ultimate circle, integration, surface, and edge and color layers form the core of the exhibition. Lenders include Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art and Miyagi City Museum of Art.
Additionally, a Gutai exhibition with large works from the 1960s by Takesada Matsutani, Sadamasa Motonaga, Kazuo Shiraga, Ryuji Tanaka, Hideo Yoshihara, Jiro Yoshihara, accompanies the show.
Opening in mid April, Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie will inaugurate its new virtual space with Onoda’s paintings from 1960 onwards, as well as a group of works on paper from 1973,
Outside his native Japan, Onoda’s works are in international museum collections such as Tate Modern, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Sammlung Goetz, and private collections in Argentina, Belgium, France, England, The Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States of America. The 2012 and 2013 survey exhibitions Spirit of an Era at the National Art Center, Tokyo, and Gutai : Splendid Playground at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art included his 1960s paintings and generated international attention to the Gutai Art Association and its members.
