Atsuko Tanaka: Japanese Avant-Garde Art from the 1960s

Atsuko Tanaka was a member of Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde artist collective which experimented with new forms of art throughout the 1950s. Through, among other things, performance, installations, theatre and interactive happenings, they explored the relationship between spirit, body and material in the desire to break down the boundaries between art and life in post-war Japan.

In 1956, Tanaka appeared wearing the legendary “Electric Dress”, which is her best-known work of art. It is a sculptural “dress”, composed of two hundred flashing light bulbs and tubes covered in red, blue, yellow and green enamel paint. Tanaka herself was at the centre of this not entirely risk-free performance, about which she herself said: “I had the fleeting thought: Is this how a death-row inmate would feel?” Tanaka combined the traditional Japanese kimono with modern-day neon advertisements and the latest technology, while at the same time in many ways anticipating the feminist strategies of the 1960s and 70s, where the focus is on the actively sensing, moving and creating female body.

Tanaka’s Holistic Circles

In her post-Gutai period from the 1960s onwards, Tanaka developed her very own visual language based on a network of concentric circles surrounded by connecting lines, a form of technical drawing or diagram executed in bright colours such as red, yellow, blue, green, black – and shades thereof. She thus transfers “Electrical Dress” to the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Often in large formats, where, like Jackson Pollock, Tanaka applies the paint horizontally by moving around the field of the image, intertwining performative strategies and gesticulations with pictorial ones in her artistic practice.

Tanaka’s use of colourful circles and lines takes on a spiritual dimension, transporting the viewer from an everyday reality into a more personal and aesthetic world. The eye is guided around the painting, but as a beholder you choose your own path: Do you venture along the bright blue paths that gracefully wind their way through the motif? Do you allow yourself to be sucked in and disappear into the big, black void that dominates the left side? Or are you attracted by the shiny red circles that manifest themselves in the physical world as afterimages on the retina, and let your gaze dance around the canvas?

Tanaka’s deep rooted, holistic philosophical perspective on the universe, nature, life and art allowed her to permeate her work with undeniable power, asserting herself as a pioneer of post-war art. Her works can be experienced in several international collections, including at MoMA in New York and have appeared in major exhibitions such as “Women in Abstraction” at the Centre Pompidou and Guggenheim Bilbao in 2021.