Yamada Masaaki

“The thick, almost impasto paint on these works partly resulted from not wanting to have weak colour planes made simply by adding brushstrokes over and over, but I recall the process of creating them as being plagued by an anxiety and fear of the unknown”.¹

Born in 1929, Yamada Masaaki worked constantly over a fifty year span and produced over five thousand paintings. Despite many years of little recognition, he dedicated himself to painting single-mindedly and was catapulted into considerable renown in 1978 with a solo exhibition at the Koh Gallery in Tokyo. In the 1980s and 1990s many of his work were accessioned into museum collections.

Between 1948-1955, Yamada produced still life paintings collectively entitled Still Life; these works were painted from memory and depict various still lives that appear as if almost dissolving into their surrounding space. In 1956, he began his series Work, which formed the core of his oeuvre for over forty years. In a complete effort to dismantle the picture plane as whole, all of these paintings were give numerical titles. The present lot can be situated among his paintings of the 1950s designated Work B, which focused on the process of assembling concentric rectangles with thick and heavy application of paint rendered in palpably overwrought brushstrokes.

1. Nakabayashi Kazuo et. al, ed., endless: The Paintings of Yamada Masaaki, (Tokyo, 2016), p. 49.