Tadaaki Kuwayama was born in Nagoya in 1932, and is currently based in New York. He graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1956, having studied nihonga, a traditional form of Japanese painting. He moved to the United States in 1958 together with his wife, artist Rakuko Naito. After settling in New York, Kuwayama eschewed both traditional Japanese painting and Abstract Expressionism that had dominated contemporary art at the time, and instead, experimented with highly reductive painting, producing canvases with brightly colored fields of paint in horizontal and vertical compositions. In 1961, his first solo exhibition was held at Green Gallery, an uptown venue known for showing the work of the downtown avant-garde.
For “Untitled” (1961-78), the artist wrapped Japanese paper all over the board, then applied thin washes of titanium-white acrylic paint mixed with water, a technique used in traditional nihonga painting. The pristine, untouched surface—a prevailing aesthetic of Minimal painting—is here intervened by the artist’s hand, visible in the texture and undulating movement of the Japanese paper across the work. A similar work, “Untitled” (1962) was exhibited in “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009) and is now in the permanent collection of the institution.
Through the 1960s, Kuwayama both refined his painting practice and began to explore three-dimensionality, creating painted wood-and-paper floor pieces and incorporating industrial materials into his work. By 1965, he had fully abandoned all nihonga techniques and began using spray-paint in an effort to make inscrutable works that were free from scratches and imperfections as well as any traces of the artist’s hand.
Since the 1960s Kuwayama’s work has continued to exhibit a subtle yet rigorous concern with perception as a quiet, spiritual experience, while relaxing the insistence on commercial materials and reintroducing media specific to the fine arts. In the 1990s, Kuwayama began the ongoing series “Projects,” which comprises works of identical color and dimension being installed with inspirations from the light and architecture of the gallery space.
Kuwayama has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as Green Gallery (1965, 1966); Museum Folkwang, Essen (1974); Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1976); Nagoya City Art Museum (1989, 2006, 2010); Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt (1997); and National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011). His work has been presented in such group exhibitions as “Systemic Painting,” Guggenheim Museum (1966); “Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1979), which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1980), Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute (1981), and Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (1981) and “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989,” Guggenheim Museum (2009). He won a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1969) and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant (1986).
