International Art News

Daido Moriyama, Shinjuku #11, 2000, gelatin silver print, 13 1/4 x 9 in., courtesy of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck. © Daido Moriyama

April 7, 2012–July 31, 2012 – Los Angeles County Museum of Art – LACMA - Japanese Pavilion
Photographer Daido Moriyama (Japan, b. 1938) first came to prominence in the mid-1960s with his gritty depictions of Japanese urban life.  His highly innovative and intensely personal photographic approach often incorporates high contrast, graininess, and tilted vantages to convey the fragmentary nature of modern realities. Fracture: Daido Moriyama presents a range of the artist’s renowned black-and-white photographs, exemplifying the radical aesthetic of are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus), as well as the debut of recent color work taken in Tokyo. A selection of his photo books—Moriyama has published more than forty to date—highlights the artist’s highly influential experimentation with reproduction media and the transformative possibilities of the printed page.  In total, Moriyama’s achievements convey the artist’s boldly intuitive exploration of urban mystery, memory, and photographic invention.

Beauty Parlor, Tokyo - Daido Moriyama c. 1975 - Gelatin silver print - 7 x 10 5/8 in. - Ralph M. Parsons Fund - © Daido Moriyama

Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daido Moriyama first trained in graphic design before taking up photography with Takeji Iwaniya, a professional photographer of architecture and crafts. Moving to Tokyo in 1961, he assisted photographer Eikoh Hosoe for three years and became familiar with the trenchant social critiques produced by photographer Shomei Tomatsu. He also drew inspiration from William Klein’s confrontational photographs of New York, Andy Warhol’s silkscreened multiples of newspaper images, and the writings of Jack Kerouac and Yukio Mishima.

Museum Hours

Donald Moffett, "Lot 092107 (X150)," 2007. Oil, cotton, aluminum, rabbit skin glue, and polyvinyl acetate on linen. 24 x 20 in. Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.

From October1, 2011 to January 8, 2012 – Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Organized by CAMH Senior Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein is the first survey exhibition of this American artist’s prolific practice. The exhibition will present work created over the last two decades, surveying nine important bodies of work that interrogate and blur the definition of painting by incorporating non-traditional materials such as video and photography. The exhibition will also address Moffett’s political engagement.

The first comprehensive survey of Moffett’s investigations into art history, paint, and form, Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein will provide viewers with insight into the breadth and range of the artist’s practice over the past twenty years. As a painter, Moffett extends the traditional two-dimensional frame, converting the ordinariness of the flat plane into highly textured relief works with his signature oil paintings or into intricate illuminations by incorporating video projections onto the canvas. The subject matter of his paintings—from landscape and nature to politics and history—are poetic, provocative, and even at times humorous. An astute and thoughtful painter, Moffett knows the power of the artist to critique the world at large, and his love of the Spanish romantic painter Goya (1746-1828) and Italian painter Morandi (1890-1964), are manifested in his ability to blend the subtle with the outlandish, the image with social critique. As a founding member of Gran Fury, the artistic arm of the activist group ACT UP, Moffett has remained engaged with issues surrounding the presence of gays in historical and contemporary culture. And he is fearless in addressing issues that still resonate today, such as the rights of openly gay men and women to serve in the military (Gays in the Military, 1990-91) and the aesthetics of gay subcultures (Fleisch, 2007). Moffett is also interested in the ecstatic and its manifestation in the secular world in which we inhabit. Moffett incorporates sound and light in his work, sometimes as stand alone projects and at other times in conjunction with his paintings, creating an ambiance more reminiscent of the art and culture of the Renaissance era than of our current technological world. While this exhibition provides contemporary views on several important topics of our contemporary lives, it is, too, a meditation on the larger, timeless universal issues of love, loss, alienation, and death.

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