Shigeki Kitani: Early Works

We are delighted to announce an exhibition of work by Shigeki Kitani (1928-2009) a leading Japanese avant-garde artist associated for 15 years with the influential Gutai collective.

The show is divided between our gallery at 23 East 67th Street and the inaugural edition of Art Miami New York at Pier 94 on the Hudson River.

28 works from the 1950s and early 1960s, many of them never exhibited before, demonstrate Kitani's mastery of a gritty yet lyrical abstraction animated by primal, chthonic energy. Five works from 1965 to 1968, the period of the artist's full Gutai membership, include two of his celebrated Torso series of colorful sculptural paintings, one shown in Europe in 1966 and the other at the major Gutai retrospective held in Tokyo in 2012. Both of these, along with 17 others on display, were preserved for many years at the Museum of Art and History in Ashiya City, birthplace of Gutai.

Our exhibition at Art Miami New York couples works by Kitani with Yuichi Inoue (1916-85), another 20th-century master whose sparse, dramatic black-and-white calligraphies fuse clarity of meaning with intensity of emotion.