Norio Imai, White Event

Gutai artist, Norio Imai, creates monumental monochrome white paintings out of almost nothing. He considers white to be the ultimate colour, a non-colour that combines all colours in perfect harmony. To him, white is a landscape made up of nothingness and emptiness.

Norio Imai’s art is reflective of an increasing shift toward the feminine, which is one of the most significant changes currently taking place in the world we live in. His works may be described as maternal, with fluid and matrixial qualities gaining importance over unambiguous masculinity. His embrace of the colour white is a return to originality, creativity, fertility and conceptual new beginnings inherent in the colour. In a complete pureness, his works embrace all possibilities. In that way, Imai has incorporated the principle that Gutai leader and co-founder, Jiro Yoshihara, imposed on all of the group’s artists: originality. His mantra: “Do what no one has done before!” was not only a rallying cry, it was a call to action.

Imai joined the Japanese avant-garde movement Gutai in 1965 and became their youngest member. Gutai was the most influential artists’ collective and artistic movement in post-war Japan and among the most important international art movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

Just like ZERO art in Europe, Gutai carried the message of a new start and tried to fulfil the promise of a rehabilitated society, yet unknown. Both groups wanted to return to the essence of life. They were on a quest for the source of where it all began and begins all over again, a big bang where spirit and matter converge.

After the devastation of World War II, which had thrown an atomic bomb on humanity, people all over the world were left scarred. Their mixed up identities were composed out of the debris of a forgotten past and a destroyed present. The destructions of the war made people crave for a new beginning and many artists of that period had sensed this very urgently. They knew that the only relevant thing that could be done at that point was to start anew and put aside the past, tradition and the dogmas it carried along with it. They knew they needed to dive into the void, the unknown, and to search for a zero point—an essence they could hold onto and which they could use as a starting point.

When Lucio Fontana made a precise cut into the canvas in order to open space, he also opened the way to a new dimension in art that reflected upon society. This void, so full of hope and meaning, is the dimension that connects us all as human beings. This universal concept, which is understood in every culture and crosses the boundaries of time, is the concept that’s rooted in art’s unconscious.

In the exhibition, Imai considered white as an Event, an ultimate blank placed in time and space for spectators to connect with and to meditate on. Imai’s sculpted white surfaces incorporate Gutai’s hope and belief for new beginnings in a pure world, and life lived to the fullest.