TANAKA Atsuko

Tanaka Atsuko was a Japanese avant-garde artist associated with the Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association), a post-war Japanese artist group founded in 1954. Born in Osaka, she studied at the Art Institute of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art and briefly attended Kyoto Municipal College of Art. In the early 1950s, she became involved with the avant-garde collective Zero-kai (Zero Society), whose members included Kanayama Akira, Murakami Saburo and Shiraga Kazuo. Tanaka joined the Gutai Art Association in 1955, developing an experimental practice encompassing paper, cloth, sound and electric light. Her early works included Work (Bell) (1955), comprising twenty electric bells connected by a long electrical cord, and Electric Dress (1956), a wearable structure incorporating approximately 200 coloured lightbulbs and tubes. From around 1957, she concentrated increasingly on two-dimensional painting, developing a distinctive vocabulary of brightly coloured circles and curved, interconnected lines. Working on unstretched canvases laid on the floor, she applied fluid synthetic resin enamel paint in direct, gestural strokes; the circles and lines of her paintings developed from the bulbs and wiring of her earlier electric works. Tanaka left Gutai in 1965 and continued to develop her painting practice, with numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her work was included in the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, and in 2001 the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History organized her first museum retrospective, Atsuko Tanaka: Search for an Unknown Aesthetic, 1954–2000, which subsequently travelled to the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art. Tanaka’s works are now held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; and the Takamatsu Art Museum.