Norio Imai “Retrospective – Time in Square”

ARTCOURT Gallery

http://www.artcourtgallery.com/eng/exhibitions/6087/

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Initiating the use of photography, video and film as new media in his work in the 1970s, Norio Imai gradually shifted the central theme of his art to “time” expression. Imai brought out the material properties of the media then available – photographic film, with its characteristic of being verifiable only after processing, glass cathode-ray tubes with their mirror-image effects, and open-reel videotape, which acts as a “measuring tape of time” – and physically imposed himself, the artist, into their systems. Producing a steady flow of performances, installations and image-media works with increasingly developed layerings of imagery, he attempted to visualize time. At the exhibitions “Re: play 1972/2015”, which opened at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in fall 2015, and “Performing for the Camera”, on this February at London’s Tate Modern, works created in the photography and video/film media of the time are on display, and the innovativeness of the methods of expression and themes of creation developed by Imai are now being re-examined. Beginning in 1964 with “Testimony of a 17-Year-Old”, his groundbreaking debut solo exhibition, Imai joined the avant-garde art group Gutai Art Association as its youngest member. He contributed works to the group’s “Gutai Exhibitions” and participated actively in the frequently held “IndОpendant” exhibitions and in open-submission shows as well. In the 1960s, at the beginning of his creative career, Imai’s “white” canvas pieces with irregular surfaces were pioneering expressions that transcended the borders between painting and relief and sculpture, and in the 1970s, his scope expanded even further, to photography, video and film. This exhibition will be the third installment of Norio Imai’s retrospective exhibitions, following 2012’s “Norio Imai Retrospective - From 17 to 22 Years Old” and 2014’s “Norio Imai Retrospective: Reflection and Projection”.

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Video Screening & Talk
Date: Apr. 16 (Sat) 15:00-17:00