“Kazuo Sakata: Reconquest” at Tokyo Station Gallery
We visited “Kazuo Sakata: Reconquest,” held at Tokyo Station Gallery.
The exhibition is curated by Kenjiro Okazaki, a visual artist who is also a scholar of modern art history.
Kazuo Sakata (1889–1956) was a painter who grasped the development of abstract painting after Cubism at its core and pushed its possibilities to the utmost. This exhibition presents the full scope of Sakata’s work — which reached a rare, exceptionally high dimension on a global scale — and unravels the possibilities of the world woven into his paintings.
Sakata sailed to France in 1921, in the aftermath of World War I, where he encountered contemporary abstract painting and worked for over ten years as one of France’s most avant-garde painters. After returning to Japan in 1933, he devoted himself to production in his hometown of Okayama, and also founded the avant-garde group “Avant-Garde Okayama,” dedicating himself to nurturing the next generation.
However, Sakata’s work was scarcely introduced outside of Okayama, either during his lifetime or after his death, and it is no exaggeration to say he had been forgotten. This exhibition — the first to present the full scope of Sakata as “a painter of the present” — is supervised by visual artist Kenjiro Okazaki, who has undertaken a rigorous analysis of modern art history and taken on the challenge of rediscovering and renewing its possibilities.
In particular, the section that reads the development of Sakata’s work after his return to Japan through to the postwar era as part of the problem field of 20th-century painterly expression, comparing him with artists both in Japan and abroad, will be an opportunity to unleash the latent power of painting. The reconquest — the regeneration — of painting, and of the world, is still possible.
Beyond Kazuo Sakata himself, the participating artists are as follows.
Fernand Léger, Hanjiro Sakamoto, Le Corbusier, Giorgio Morandi, Nicolas de Staël, Kikuji Yamashita, Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, Isamu Wakabayashi
