ARAKAWA | Untitled

Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York
Private Collection
Christie's, London, 1 July 1980, Lot 368
Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1980

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly stronger and brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some light wear, rub marks and minute media accretions in isolated places to all four extreme edges. Further close inspection reveals drying cracks and impact cracks in places throughout and three short and faint abrasions with some minute specks of associated loss to the lower centre of the composition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Employing both the written word and a graphic sensibility, the present works by Japanese architect and artist Shusaku Arakawa pertinently challenge the expectations of factuality from diagrammatic images. These are paintings that question modes of perception and deny our assumptions of rationality. Untitled and There are… present beguiling nonsensical maps; arrows without direction, text without discernable meaning, cryptic technicoloured bands and plans devoid of decipherable sense. Betraying the factual associations of the diagram, Arakawa’s paintings forefront the act of reading a painting. These works are perhaps best described as “diagrams of the mind” (Ealan Wingate, ‘Diagrammatic paintings by Japanese architect Shusaku Arakawa go on show in New York’, dezeen, March 2019, online). The result is an startingly experiential viewing experience, decoding the mechanics of perception and questioning the legibility of the world around us. Reviewing Arakawa’s 1966 exhibition at Dwan Gallery, writer Suzi Gablick succinctly describes this phenomenon in the artist’s work “His work vibrates with extrasensorial perceptions and eidetic charges, and the strange luminosity of dematerialising shapes implies things are happening which are not seen” (Suzi Gablik, 1966, cited in: Andy Battaglia, ‘The Legacy of the Radically Experimental Arakawa Heads to Gagosian, ArtNews, February 2017, online). In 1961, Arakawa moved his life from Japan to New York, arriving with just $14 in his pocket and a phone number for Marcel Duchamp. This marked the beginning of the artist’s New York years, during which Arakawa’s feverish diagrammatic investigations laid the foundations for his deeply revered and radically experimental architectural career. Arakawa developed a close friendship with Duchamp, which undoubtably spilled into the artist's diagrammatic canvases. The influence of Duchamp’s stern refusal of empirical sense perhaps helped to form the backbone of the artist’s practice of this period. Even Arakawa’s geometric compositions visually recall Duchamp’s infamous Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor’s, Even, 1915-23. Arakawa’s “great breakdown of diagrammatic information” (Ealan Wingate, op cit., 2019) sings with a deadpan Duchampian sense of anti-logic.

Untitled and There are... stand as important emblems of this formative period of the artist’s work. The experiential tone of these canvases foreshadow Arakawa’s illustrious, revolutionary architectural practice, forming the basis of the artist’s architectural core values.