KIKUJI KAWADA | PRESS RELEASE

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs is pleased to present an exhibition of work created over a fifty-year span by eminent Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada. Rare images from Kawada’s early series,The Map (or Chizu in Japanese), from 1960-1965 will be shown alongside his most recent bodies of work: 2011-phenomena and Last Things (2010-2015). Now in his early 80s, Kawada’s later experiments with color and digital materials are as inquisitive and dynamic as his earlier black-and-white analog work.

Kawada’s past themes – the expression of trauma during Japan’s post World War II reconstruction after defeat (The Map), the relation of the human world to celestial forces (The Last Cosmology) and the rebirth of imagined cities following the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Invisible City) - expand in his most recent work to touch on global tensions related to political fears, climate change and media saturation in the years since the recent natural and nuclear disasters in Japan stemming from the Tohoku earthquake five years ago. Whereas The Map - a seminal photo book of the 20th century published in 1965 - looks at history through the aftermath of war and the particulars of the bombing of Hiroshima, 2011-phenomona and Last Things present an expanded vision of the world influx. In this latest work, Kawada utilizes color and layering offered by the digital medium to expressive force. His visionary understanding of graphics and complex photographic narrative are seen to full effect in these sumptuous and challenging photographs.

Photo historian Gerry Badger writes about Kawada, “... His photographs are a masterly amalgam of abstraction and realism, of the specific and the ineffable, woven into a tapestry that makes the act of reading them a process of re-creation in itself.”

Kikuji Kawada was co-founder of the photographers’ cooperative VIVO in 1957 with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara and others. John Szarkowski included images from The Map in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Japanese Photography exhibition in 1974. Since then, his work has been presented at the Barbican Art Gallery, London; Centre George Pompidou and the Jeu de Paume in Paris; the International Center of Photography, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography among others. In addition to MoMA, SFMoMA, MFAH and the Pompidou, Kawada’s photographs are also found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library and London’s Tate Modern along with numerous museums in Japan. Most recently, the full set of 88 images from The Map was featured in the traveling exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography organized by and first presented at the Tate Modern.

Please join us for a reception at the Gallery on Wednesday, March 9th from 6-8pm during Asia Week. Two days later, on the fifth year anniversary of the tsunami and Fukushima disaster, New York’s Japan Society will open In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11. The exhibition, which includes work by Kawada, was organized by and first shown at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The accompanying catalog, along with other books on the artist, will be available for purchase at the Gallery.

For additional information or to request images, please contact the Gallery at +1 212 517-8700 or by email at info@lparkerstephenson.nyc.