Location

Alison Bradley Projects

526 W. 26th St. Suite 814

Dates

September 8 - October 30, 2021

Opening Reception: September 9 

Alison Bradley Projects is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition, FIERCE AUTONOMY, seminal paintings by Yuki Katsura (b. Tokyo, 1913-1991). The exhibition features works that have never been exhibited outside of Japan, offering an exceedingly rare opportunity to enter the world of Katsura’s unyielding independence, both in terms of the boundaries of modernist expression as well as her own place as a woman within Japanese society and the world.

Despite the many challenges of being a female artist in Japan’s male-dominated art world, Katsura’s bold refusal to bend to any conventional mode of expression heralded her impact as a pioneering force in Tokyo’s pre and postwar painting scene and the genesis of the Japanese avant-garde. Katsura destabilized fixed traditions throughout her oeuvre, defiantly proclaiming that she must “resist Fauvism, resist Surrealism, and paint pictures that are no one's but my own.” 

Embraced by influential critics of her time such as Seiji Tōgō, Takachiyo Uemura, and Ichirō Hariu, she was instrumental in the organization of prominent postwar art collectives—in 1938 she was a founding member of the experimental Ninth Room Association (Kyushitsu-kai) alongside Jirō Yoshihara, who would go on to establish the influential Gutai Art Association (Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai) sixteen years later. Katsura also co-founded the Association of Women Painters (Jyoryū Gaka Kyōkai) in 1946, was an organizing secretary of the Japan Avant-garde Artists Club (Nihon Abangyarudo Bijutsuka Kurabu), and participated insurrealist painter Taro Okamoto’s Night Art Society (Yoru no Kai) at his invitation in 1948. She served as a member and prominent juror of the independent oil painting association Nika-kai from 1950-56.

FIERCE AUTONOMY concentrates on Katsura’s lifelong engagement with representation and abstraction, revealing shrewd political proclivities that earned the artist critical acclaim and notoriety within Japan, but may have been impenetrable to western critics at the time. In particular, this exhibition showcases paintings produced during two formative moments in Katsura’s six-decade career: representational works from the early 1950s when she was uniquely positioned as a woman in the center of the Japanese painting world, and her experiments into abstraction in the early 1960s following her solo travels in Paris, New York City, and the Central African Republic, where she interacted with the likes of Yves Klein, Michel Tapié, Jean Cocteau, Betty Parsons, and Yayoi Kusama. Katsura’s experiments with materiality, spatial depth, and color can be retrospectively appreciated as mirrors into the artist’s psyche as she negotiated the rapidly shifting politics of gender roles and aesthetic traditions that surrounded her in these distinctive locales.