Masahisa Fukase
The Unpublished Works
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco
May 30 - June 30, 2001
The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of unpublished photographs by Japanese photographer, MASAHISA FUKASE.
The negatives from which this current body of work was produced were recently discovered at a country home where Masahisa Fukase spent time away from the pressures of Tokyo. These eclectic images, never exhibited before, represent a playfulness rarely found in this artist's work.
Masahisa Fukase is considered to be both a legend and an enigma in his native Japan. For a culture that is traditionally reluctant to expose emotion in public, the expressionistic character of Fukase's work was, in part, the result of the development of the generation that evolved after WWII.
Masahisa Fukase was born in 1934, growing up in a decade of the first Japanese children in which mannered self-control was not the ideal civic behavior. This new perspective, coupled with the effects of war, exploded into the avant-garde art scene in Tokyo. Inelegant printing techniques emerged and the manic style of photography that Fukase shared with his contemporaries, among them Eikoh Hosoe, Daidoh Moriyama, and Shomei Tomatsu, reflected the "reaction to a world turned upside down."
Masahisa Fukase's work was included in the important 1986 exhibition Black Sun: The Eyes of Four, which traveled from The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, to The Philadelphia Museum of Art. This show brought Masahisa Fukase's work, as well as the other three contemporary Japanese photographers, to the attention of the American art world. He recently exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France as well as the Foundation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris.
STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.wirtzgallery.com
