The 2nd Tokyo Gallery Exhibition

Yoshio Sekine

Yoshio Sekine was born in Wakayama, Japan. Sekine met the influential painter Jiro Yoshihara (1905-1972) through the Jiyu Bijutsu Kyoukai (Free Artists' Association) and was involved in the founding of the avant-garde Gutai group in 1954. In 1955, Sekine participated in The 7th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. In 1958, his work was selected for an exhibition curated by Michel Tapié (1909-1987), The International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, which launched at the Takashimaya Department Store in Osaka and then travelled to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Sekine left Gutai and moved to Tokyo in 1959. At The 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1963, he presented a painting of an abacus for the first time. From this point, Sekine went on to build his oeuvre around recurring motifs such as abacuses, gates, rail wagons and Mt. Fuji. His other notable exhibitions include Trends in Contemporary Art: Paintings and Sculptures (the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 1964), The 2nd Nagaoka Contemporary Art Museum Award Exhibition (Nagaoka-shi, Niigata, 1965) and The 1960’s: A Decade of Change in Contemporary Japanese Art (the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1981, later travelling to the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto). Sekine also received the prestigious Mainichi Art Award in 1952.

The abacus was perhaps the most prominent subject in Sekine's artistic career. He produced many works iterating this motif in a diverse range of colour schemes and compositions until his later years. Abacus beads can be moved and rearranged, each configuration signifying a number. Because of this reconfigurability and semiotic function, abacus beads make an intriguing motif for generating geometric compositions. In some of his works, the bead configuration indicates the date the work was completed. Through such play on a numerical sign system, Sekine's depictions of abacuses seem to turn to abstraction. Simultaneously, these works could also be seen as representational images that bring out the abstract qualities inherent to the abacus itself, achieving a new kind of 'realism' that transcends traditional illusionism.

Kishio Suga

Kishio Suga was born in 1944, Iwate prefecture, Japan. Suga graduated from the Painting Department of Tama Art University in 1968. From the late 1960s onwards, he has been active as one of the central figures of Mono-ha, a sculptural and installation based art movement that emerged in the late 1960s. Through his practice of assembling natural, industrial or found materials into a room size installation piece, he intends to examine the relation between objects, space, and human perception in tandem to the surrounding environment. Suga’s solo exhibitions have been organized by numerous museums in Japan including Kishio Suga Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997; Stance, Yokohama City Museum, 1999; Uncertain Void: Installation by Kishio Suga, Iwate Museum of Art, 2005. His most recent solo show Situated Latency was held at the Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo in 2015.