No. 1

“I felt that color was something that everybody painted on by hand, and that artistic production was seen as an act of human creation. I wanted to deny that. That’s how my work started out. I wanted to obliterate all elements of what had come before, and to create multiple versions of the same thing.” - Tadaaki Kuwayama

Brilliant in its utter blankness, Untitled: Red and Blue, No.1 embodies Tadaaki Kuwayama’s signature style of reductivist minimalism. Kuwayama developed his personal brand of minimalism after he moved to New York City with his wife in 1958. Unlike his contemporaries, Kuwayama defied the norms of Abstract Expressionism and traditional Japanese art, nihonga, which he specialized in training at the Tokyo University of Fine Art and Music. He was inspired by his friends Frank Stella and Donald Judd to focus on the process of artistic creation rather than the end product, striving for dematerialization as he felt nihonga pigments and materials were too restrictive. Thus, Kuwayama began to convey compositional emptiness through elementary blocks of paint that seemed to continue beyond the edges of the canvas and into the realms of the viewer and the artist. Such transcendental interrelationship manifests the concept of endlessness that insinuates the infinitude of the universe. Moreover, the striking austerity of his works evoke the mindfulness principle of Buddhism that states “nothing to preoccupy awareness but awareness itself”.