Atsuko Tanaka

Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist. She was a central figure of the Gutai Art Association from 1955 to 1965. Her works have found increased curatorial and scholarly attention across the globe since the early 2000s, when she received her first museum retrospective in Ashiya, Japan, which was followed by the first retrospective abroad, in New York and Vancouver. Her work was featured in multiple exhibitions on Gutai art in Europe and North America.

Tanaka was born in Osaka, on February 10, 1932. She had four older sisters and four older brothers. She studied at the Department of Western Painting at Kyoto Municipal College of Art (now Kyoto City University of Arts) in 1950 and left to attend the Art Institute of Osaka Municipal Museum of Art from 1951.

During her study at college, Tanaka befriended her upperclassman Akira Kanayama. Kanayama advised her to explore new artistic languages and later invited her to join an artists' collective, Zero Society (Zero-kai), which he co-founded with other young artists, including Kazuo Shiraga and Saburo Murakami.

During an extended period of hospitalization in 1953, Tanaka started to create non-figurative artworks. Inspired by the calendar with which she counted days, Tanaka began to make a series of works that consisted of handwritten numbers on various collaged materials, including hemp cloth, tracing paper, and newspaper. In some of these works, Tanaka repeated and fragmented the numbers to de-naturalize the meaning of numerical signs.

In 1955, Tanaka, Kanayama, and other members of Zero Society joined the Gutai Art Association, an avant-garde artists' group led by artist Yoshihara Jiro. After joining Gutai, Tanaka created several iconic works such as Electric Dress (1956), Work (Bell, 1956), and Work (Pink Rayon, 1955) that earned both public attention and positive responses from art critics. She also performed Stage Cloth (1957) at Gutai Art on the Stage, an event held by Gutai at the Sankei Hall in Osaka.

As Tanaka's solo artistic career soared throughout the late 50s and early 60s, her relationship with Yoshihara Jiro became strained. Due to her mental instability and the tension within the group, Tanaka decided to leave Gutai in 1965 and married Kanayama. They moved into a house at the temple Myōhōji in Osaka. She produced most of her works at home and in the flat on the second floor of her parents' house, ten minutes from where she had lived. In 1972, Tanaka and her husband moved to Nara.

In her post-Gutai period, Tanaka mainly created large paintings, applying synthetic resin enamel paints to horizontally laid canvases. She developed unique motifs of colorful circles and intertwining lines from her earlier drawings inspired by Electric Dress and Bell. Her paintings from this period continued to attract attention in Japan and from abroad.

On December 3, 2005, Tanaka died of pneumonia after a traffic accident, aged 74.

Tanaka's abstract paintings, sculptures, performances and installations challenged conventional notions of how works of art should appear or "perform". Her use of everyday materials, such as factory-dyed textiles, electric bells, and light bulbs revealed the artistic beauty of mundane objects.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023