Yuko Nasaka
, Osaka, Japan — Lives and works in Osaka, Japan
Yuko Nasaka was one of the few female members of the Gutai Art Association. She joined in 1963 and became a key member of the group’s second-generation activities.
Nasaka’s work from this period is inventive, experimental, and highly original. She displays a masterful use of technology and cutting-edge industrial materials — two hallmarks of Gutai — through her use of brightly hued car lacquer. Her large, grid-like relief works are a modular series of square wooden panels, which she coated with a thin layer of glue, plaster and clay, and then placed individually on a homemade mechanical turntable. As the panel rotated, she used a palette knife to carve patterns into the material, a gesture she compared to working on a potter's wheel.
About Yuko Nasaka
Nasaka displayed the paintings in grids, some as large as the mural she created for her solo show at the Gutai Pinacotheca in 1964. She finished the panels with a fine spray of car lacquer, misted with an auto-factory air compressor. The meaning generated by Nasaka’s circles is infinite and open to many possible interpretations, which is an essential quality of every authentic Gutai work.
I believe it has been nearly three years since I first saw Yuko Nasaka’s work at the Ashiya City Exhibition. Those pictures consisted solely of countless small thorny holes, made with a drill, into a cool, grey monochromatic surface. Though they did not strike me as especially novel, the works were all massive, measuring several meters, and they were filled with tens of thousands of holes, exuding a rigorous spirit that conveyed the artist’s earnest attitude to her work. Nasaka eventually came to be an official member of Gutai, but her tenacity to make epic works and line the wall with great numbers of them remains unchanged. Now, however, the desolate quality of her work is awash with rich colours. the barbed holes and subsequent rows of nails have been replaced by small circles of colour. Although Nasaka recently appears to have become absorbed by the creation of striking monochromatic circles using turntables, she still transpires to be compelled to group her works into large accumulations. both vertically and horizontally, Nasaka places together pieces with similar qualities, as she combines them every day to create extremely large works. Due to this astute structural approach, we are constantly forced to set aside the maximum amount of wall space in our exhibition spaces for Nasaka’s work. The Yuko Nasaka whom people meet is physically small yet her appearance belies a taciturn vitality. Nasaka’s distinct, persistent, and in some ways formidable work shows a great deal of promise.
