Dos grabadores japoneses en Buenos Aires

This newsletter announces the opening of the exhibitions of two Japanese printmakers, Tsuyoshi Yayanagi and Kosuke Kimura, at the CAYC. These events provided yet another example of the international scope of activities that Glusberg envisioned from the very beginning. In terms of experimental works, the former interpreted ancestral themes under a Pop look; the latter was a professor and the president of the Kyoto Technological Institute. There is a brief bio of each artist.

Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.

Tsuyoshi Yayanagi (b. 1933) and Kosuke Kimura (b. 1936) were both part of the Japanese delegation at the XI São Paulo Biennial, which opened in early September 1971. When making his selection for the Brazilian event, the curator Tadao Ogura chose young painters, printmakers, and sculptors.

The two artists came to Buenos Aires for the opening of their exhibition at the CAYC’s premises. Their works were of interest to the center since they experimented with the expressive possibilities of the evolution of science and technology as applied to new engraving and printing techniques. Kimura combined photographic and silkscreen techniques to create poetic collages that were influenced by the media and advertising, a field in which he had also worked. He represented his country at Contemporary Japanese Art, the traveling show; his work was acclaimed at the Second Printmaking Biennial in England in 1968, where he took home the Memorial Prize, and later at the International Printmaking Biennial in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Yayanagi, for his part, used silkscreen printing to compose works with a Pop poetic that are, nonetheless, reminiscent of ukiyo-e, the ancient traditional form of printmaking. He moved to São Paulo when he was very young and later had a one-man show at the MAM-SP (Museu de Arte Moderna). In the mid-1960s he was awarded a grant to study printing methods developed at S. W. Hayter’s studio in Paris. Over time, his works never lost their Pop look.       

[For additional information, see GT-77 (doc. no. 1476306) and GT-78 (doc. no. 1476275)].