Yasuda Haruhiko

13 May - 18 July 1995

Hours: 9:30a.m.- 5:00 p.m.
Entry is permitted thirty minutes before the galleries are closed.
Closed: Closed on Mondays

Admission: charged

We take great pleasure in the opening of the first retrospective exhibition of Haruhiko Yasuda, a representative artist of Japanese contemporary sculpture.

Yasuda was born in Wakayama Prefecture in 1930. He studied with Tsuruzo Ishii at the Tokyo National School of Fine Arts, and in 1958 traveled to France where he enrolled as a special student in the studio of Ossip Zadkine at the Academie Grande Chaumiere, Paris. He then traveled to Italy where his activities centered in Rome, finally returning to Japan in 1968.Yasuda made his Japanese debut with abstract sculpture in stainless steel.

Yasuda cultivated a sharp perception during his ten years in Europe, a perception that occasionally aims to sweep away all emotions as it remains within his distinctive forms developed from their conceptual sources in the ruins and remains of the ancient world. Since the 1970s Yasuda has created a series of works in steel that take the city as their theme. These works range as far as the realm of outdoor sculpture and have been critically acclaimed both in Japan and overseas.

The current retrospective exhibition consists of forty three sculptural works and sixty drawings spanning his earliest representational sculptures to his latest works Wall around a Hamlet and Inaccessible Gate, providing a thorough introduction of Yasuda’s oeuvre. We hope that this exhibition will provide the viewer with an understanding of the tension-filled sculptural world of Haruhiko Yasuda.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt gratitude to all those museums and collectors who have generously agreed to lend their precious works to this effort. In addition we would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Kao Corporation for their support and to the Nantenshi Gallery for their cooperation. And last, we are deeply indebted to Haruhiko Yasuda for his creation of new works specifically for this exhibition and for providing helpful materials.