青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

In the 1980s, the international New Painting (Neo-expressionist) movement signaled the resurgence of painting in an art scene where installations, with their manipulation of three-dimensional space, were on the rise. Riding on this new wave, Yoshimoto Sakuji (1959–) made a memorable debut with large-format paintings featuring powerful, sinuous brushstrokes and heavy textures alongside contrastingly graphical imagery and buoyant forms. Later, from the 1990s, Yoshimoto embarked on a period of intensive sketching and experimentation with new forms of expression, adopting elements of Chinese line painting and focusing on the themes and compositions of post-Renaissance European art in a quest that would reshape his style into serene yet dynamic renderings of allegorical subjects. Since 2005 he has also served as a professor at the Nagoya University of Arts, where he instructs aspiring artists in both theory and practice.

This collection covers more than one hundred paintings from Yoshimoto’s beginnings up to the present day. Together with an essay and work commentaries by the artist and analyses by curator Takeba Jo (Nagoya City Art Museum) and art critic Yamawaki Kazuo, the works offer insight into the singular trajectory of a figure who is critical to a full understanding of contemporary Japanese painting as it has unfolded since the 1980s.

Yoshimoto Sakuji was born in 1959 in Gifu Prefecture and graduated from the Nagoya University of Arts, where he now teaches as a professor. He first came to attention in the 1980s for his large-format paintings combining powerful brushstrokes and heavy textures with graphical imagery and buoyant forms. This was followed by a period of experimentation over which he energetically absorbed the themes, compositions, and techniques of Chinese and post-Renaissance European painting; his quest for new forms of expression continues unabated to this day.