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GALERIE RICHARD - Norio Imai

700 views · Published 15 February 2014 · 5:11 · Indexed 23 September 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2014 · Entertainment

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Galerie Richard is pleased to present Norio Imai in his New York debut solo 
exhibition Perspective in White from February 13th through March 29th.  The artist 
(b. Osaka, 1946) joined the Gutai Art Association in 1965 and was the youngest 
member of the avant-garde collective of post-war era Japan. Imai gained early 
recognition for his white monochrome works that featured a sculptural quality. The 
artist uses the canvas in a way that allows him to experiment and develop painting 
in three dimensions.  By doing so, he plays with light by adding tonality to the 
monochrome and creates fluid and organic curved lines with inherent sensuality, 
serenity and peace.

 The exhibition features historical works and recent works created in the 2000's. This 
is an opportunity to discover fourteen works made in 1964-65, that were destroyed 
and recreated by the artist with ready-made objects and, molded three-
dimensional objects between the stretcher and the white painted canvas. Some of 
the molds are surrounded by white painted tacks around the object for figurative 
visual effect and for making the emphasis on the bulges on surface. Eliminating 
materiality is what he focused on in the series of early white pieces from his Gutai 
period.

The exhibition features six paintings entitled White Ceremony with different shaped 
canvases originally made in 1966 and 1967. They have been in high demanded due 
to their sensual reminiscence of feminine shapes, which deftly reflect "one of the 
most important changes that are taking place in our culture. The dimension in which 
we live today is increasingly shifting towards the feminine. Fluid, matrixial qualities 
are gaining importance over unambiguous masculinity. I would describe Imai's work 
as maternal. In its complete pureness it is pregnant with possibilities."[1] The 
canvases become organic bulbous shapes, and white immaterial ethereal spaces. 
Like Matsutani and Shirley Kaneda's paintings, these shapes seem to form 
spontaneously and therefore look similar to shapes we encounter in nature. This 
work also highlights the soft aesthetic that emerged in the 60's inspired by the 
technology of the Cold War Space Race. The influence was widespread, offering 
sumptuous aerodynamic curves to art, design, fashion, and architecture.

A major work in the exhibition is titled White Event IV (1966). Constructed from a 
wooden frame and rubber surface, a motorized internal structure moves four 
wooden bars and creates a simultaneously bulging and receding outward 
appearance. The White Event series is Imai's first experiment in kinetic art. His 
fascination for film, and the moving image in the 60's, led him to add kinetic effects 
to his work. He considered that movement in art should no longer be merely 
visualized by an optical effect and instead opted for literal kinesis.

The exhibition also includes several works from the late 2000's series Shadows of 
Memory. The practical object is transformed into ghostly abstract shapes on the 
painting. Visually it is apparent that everyday items each have a different bulge in 
itself, and such visual characteristics of the item appears in the work. A bicycle 
helmet or a boat propeller is transformed into a beautiful sculpture featuring 
modernist abstract shapes. Shadow of Memory 038 - Spiral looks like an 
architectural model. The work Shadow of Memory 107 - Mandolin is a suspended 
painting-sculpture that we experience by visualizing its two opposite sides; on the 
front side we can see a musical instrument shape and on the back side we are 
referred to an organic bulbous shape that is more abstract or bodily related.

For Norio Imai, the possibility to represent the essence of an object -- the inherent 
energy of a shape -- are statements in these works that break through borders 
between painting and performance, object and process, abstraction and figuration.

Imaifirst exhibited in theGutai Pinacotheca, Osaka in 1964. He was included in every 
Gutai exhibition until the group broke up in 1972. He has been featured in Gutai 
surveys including Gutai II: 1959--1965, at Ashiya City Museum of Art and 
Historyin1993,  Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky at Guggenheim 
Soho and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1994; Gutai: Splendid 
Playground at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2013. Featured in renowned 
collections such as the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, The Museum of 
Modern Art in Shiga, The Osaka Museum of Modern Art, Hyōgo Prefectural Museum 
of Art, The Miyagi Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Getty Center, Los 
Angeles, and Vervoordt Foundation in Wijnegen.

Music by:
Chill Carrier - A New Day

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