拍品专文
The Japanese-born, Los Angeles-based artist Takako Yamaguchi creates a work of elegance and beauty with Sally and Miu-Miu from her celebrated Smoking Women series of just eight paintings created between 1993 and 1995. Comprising oil paint and applied bronze leaf on canvas, the surface is luminous and textured, with beautiful curves and flourishes of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. These are the very movements the artist is reclaiming from the European canon. Originally inspired by Japanese printmaking and design, Yamaguchi seeks to return attribution for these aesthetic genres to her cultural heritage and female identity in the execution of these exquisite works.
A graceful woman has her back turned to us, and we gaze upon her luxurious silver dress with floral motifs that reflect the artist’s interest in kimono design. The smoke from her cigarette rises up the right side of the canvas and becomes a white and silver pattern. She alights upon a flattened alcove of grey and purple that contains a sleeping cat, the titular Miu-Miu. Yamaguchi’s skill is abundantly on display in Sally and Miu-Miu. As Artforum observes, “Yamaguchi produces intensely crisp details so precise that they often seem computer generated. The magic lies in her astonishing brushwork and subtle optics…The greatest delight of Yamaguchi’s art rests in its delicate balances: of two and three dimensions, of the absurd and the everyday, of deep serenity and endless surprise” (E. Lincoln, “Critics’ Picks: Takako Yamaguchi,” Artforum, May 2023).
Yamaguchi was born in Okayama, Japan, in 1952 and emigrated to the United States in 1973, where she earned her B.A. and M.F.A. at Bates College and UC Santa Barbara, respectively. Soon after, she settled in Los Angeles. She has been associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement, something which the artist attributes to her immigrant experience, “I’ve been living and working in this country all my adult life and I still think of myself somewhat as an outsider…[which] perhaps explains my strong affinity for things and images or ideas [that have] fallen out of boundaries of dominant discourse” (‘Takako Yamaguchi,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 18, 2020). Yamaguchi recently re-entered the critical lexicon with her lauded exhibition at Ortuzar Projects in New York last year. She is included in this year’s Whitney Biennial, as well as the influential exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019), which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. Her work has also been acquired by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (which holds an example of the Smoking Women series).
Sally and Miu-Miu celebrate beauty unabashed, which is itself a revolutionary act. As the artist explains, “I discovered decoration, fashion and beauty along with sentimentality, empathy and pleasure; forms and values I hold all the more precious for their long exclusion from serious consideration” (Takako Yamaguchi, “Artist Statement,” Foundation for Contemporary Arts, December 2023). Sally and Miu-Miu is filled with these ideals; it entrances us and builds a world that traverses the past and the present, high and low.
A graceful woman has her back turned to us, and we gaze upon her luxurious silver dress with floral motifs that reflect the artist’s interest in kimono design. The smoke from her cigarette rises up the right side of the canvas and becomes a white and silver pattern. She alights upon a flattened alcove of grey and purple that contains a sleeping cat, the titular Miu-Miu. Yamaguchi’s skill is abundantly on display in Sally and Miu-Miu. As Artforum observes, “Yamaguchi produces intensely crisp details so precise that they often seem computer generated. The magic lies in her astonishing brushwork and subtle optics…The greatest delight of Yamaguchi’s art rests in its delicate balances: of two and three dimensions, of the absurd and the everyday, of deep serenity and endless surprise” (E. Lincoln, “Critics’ Picks: Takako Yamaguchi,” Artforum, May 2023).
Yamaguchi was born in Okayama, Japan, in 1952 and emigrated to the United States in 1973, where she earned her B.A. and M.F.A. at Bates College and UC Santa Barbara, respectively. Soon after, she settled in Los Angeles. She has been associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement, something which the artist attributes to her immigrant experience, “I’ve been living and working in this country all my adult life and I still think of myself somewhat as an outsider…[which] perhaps explains my strong affinity for things and images or ideas [that have] fallen out of boundaries of dominant discourse” (‘Takako Yamaguchi,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 18, 2020). Yamaguchi recently re-entered the critical lexicon with her lauded exhibition at Ortuzar Projects in New York last year. She is included in this year’s Whitney Biennial, as well as the influential exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019), which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. Her work has also been acquired by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (which holds an example of the Smoking Women series).
Sally and Miu-Miu celebrate beauty unabashed, which is itself a revolutionary act. As the artist explains, “I discovered decoration, fashion and beauty along with sentimentality, empathy and pleasure; forms and values I hold all the more precious for their long exclusion from serious consideration” (Takako Yamaguchi, “Artist Statement,” Foundation for Contemporary Arts, December 2023). Sally and Miu-Miu is filled with these ideals; it entrances us and builds a world that traverses the past and the present, high and low.