Iida Yoshikuni - in the Time and Space of Existence and Words

5 - 31 January 1988

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

Admission: charged

“Yoshikuni IIDA - in the Time and Space of Existence and Words” is an exhibition mounted jointly by Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo, and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Born in 1923 in Tochigi Prefecture, Yoshikuni Iida ( -2006) was graduated from Keio University, and subsequently studied oil painting at Tokyo University of Arts. He gained a strong reputation as a sculptor in Europe, where he worked from 1956 to 1967 in studios in Rome, Vienna and West Berlin. During 1968, shortly after his return to Japan, he leapt to the forefront of the new generation of Japanese abstract sculptors, taking both the Prize of the Museum of Modern Art Kamakura in the Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan and the Grand Prize in the Kobe Suma Rikyu Park Exhibition of the Modern Japanese Sculptures.

Having gone to Europe origina11y to study painting, Iida came to devote his energy to sculpture after studying with Pericle Fazzini in Rome and being deeply impressed by a Henry Moore retrospective in Munich. Between 1961 and 1965 he produced the HITO series, with the human body as main motif. The COSMOS series is representative of the numerous colored sculptures Iida created from 1965 until his return to Japan in 1967. In Japan, using stainless steel to achieve a mirror effect, he began imparting a sense of motion and time to his forms, and mobiles became his major focus. Iida’s art then took an unusual turn as he began investigating the possibilities of a new linguistic worlds involving poetry with sculpture, by creating works which are not merely plastic forms but also stand in the realms of poetics and ontology.

This exhibition is an overview of the work of Yoshikuni Iida. It includes some 45 sculptures, ten from his most recent work and others from the 1962 HITO series and from the polyhedron series which ingeniously combines stainless steel with multicolor nylon rope. Also on exhibit are about 120 drawings, both recent and from the early years in Europe, as well as the Chromatopoiema series of prints.

We are most grateful to the museums and other owners who have kindly lent us works for display, and to the various other parties who have offered their cooperation.