| Shortly after it was founded in 1925 the Neue Sammlung – the State Museum of Applied Arts and Design in Munich – began acquiring Japanese articles for everyday use. Since the 1980s it has systematically built up a separate section that is devoted to Japan, which, in addition to arts and crafts product also includes graphic design and product design. The outstanding role that Japanese aesthetics played in the development of modern European art is one of the reasons for this focus, though an even more important reason is that even today influences and inspirations from Japan are in evidence in any number of forms, particularly in the area of design.
This was the reason behind our long-standing wish to devote a solo exhibition to Ikko Tanaka, the most important and influential Japanese designer of the current age.
Born in 1930 in the old imperial city of Nara, Ikko Tanaka studied art in Kyoto before opening his first design studio in Tokyo in 1963.
His extremely varied oeuvre ranges from posters, book and magazine designs, signets
and packaging etc. to experimental calligraphy and includes works for international
companies such as Shiseido, Issey Miyake, Hanae Mori and Salvatore Ferragamo
through to his activities as Art Director and exhibition designer; among other
things he designed the pavilion of Japanese history at Expo '70 in Osaka and
the 1980 "Japan Style" exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
It is posters, however, that form the focal point of his work, for the most part for cultural events, theater and dance performances (with Japanese Noh theater playing a particular role), concerts and art exhibitions etc., for type manufacturers and fashion designers, as well as social and environmental topics.
His stylistic range oscillates between unconstrained gestural strokes of the brush and geometrical stringency, bright colors and laconism in black and white. Bold aesthetics from world of the tea ceremony, of which he has long been a master, clever abstraction, a fine balance of the asymmetric, calligraphic expressiveness and the most sublime elegance: these are the characteristics of Ikko Tanaka’s designs, in which he blends a deep-rooted familiarity with Japanese traditions with western Modernism to produce contemporary visual expression.
Since 1980 "the distiller of visual truth", as Ivan Chermayeff once referred
to Tanaka, has time and again donated selected works to the Neue Sammlung.
This exhibition covering five decades of his oeuvre became reality thanks to
the collaboration with the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, where last year the retrospective
was on view as part of the "Japan in Germany" campaign. Ikko Tanaka
himself made a representative selection of his works, which was enhanced with
rare examples from the Neue Sammlung collection, and in addition designed the
exhibition catalogue and poster. We would like to take this opportunity to
thank Mr. Tanaka for his generosity.
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