Tadanori Yokoo

In 1980, he decided to limit his graphic arts work by devoting himself mainly to painting, exploring themes emerging from personal as well as collective memory, such as death, war, society, life, spirituality and dreams. Yokoo’s works are deeply rooted in the culture of his native country and reflect the changes that have taken place in post-war Japan.

Waterfall Perspective (2006), the large-scale installation consisting of 3700 postcards and a painting covering an entire wall of the exhibition in a gigantic collage, adheres to the artist’s most cherished compositional principles: borrowing, citing, and repeating an obsessive motif. At the same time, it amplifies the metaphor of collapse—found throughout his oeuvre—to unprecedented proportions.

The selection of graphic works exhibited on the mezzanine gives a brief survey of the illustrations created by Yokoo between 1965 and 1997. They attest to Yokoo’s close ties with artists such as Yukio Mishima, Issey Miyake and more recently, Naoki Takizawa.