Art Brussels

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is participating in this year’s edition of Art Brussels, as part of the PRIME section as well as the fair’s new REDISCOVERY program. On a new location, Tour & Taxis, we will extend our group show of young artists with a solo booth dedicated to a rediscovery of Yuko Nasaka, one of the most prominent voices of Gutai’s last generation.

Gutai-Japan’s most important avant-garde art movement (1954-72)-has regained its prominent place in art history only in recent years. Whereas male proponents of the group’s first generation, such as Kazuo Shiraga and Jiro Yoshihara, are well known in the art world, the highly individual process and innovative work of Yuko Nasaka is still finding its way to the general public and is therefore worthy of REDISCOVERY.

Being one of the few female members, Nasaka produced a large body of work that is experimental as she displays a masterful use of technology and cutting-edge industrial materials - two hallmarks of Gutai - through her use of colourful lacquer. Her large, grid-like relief works are a modular series of wooden panels, which she coated with a thin layer of glue, plaster and clay, and then placed individually on a potter’s wheel. The meaning of these circular works is infinite and open to many possible interpretations. For example, her circles seem to be a direct reference to mankind’s attempt to make a first landing on the moon in the 1960s, bringing to mind man’s incessant reach for the stars and his place in the unfathomable expanse of the cosmos.

Just as Yuko Nasaka is trying to find meaning in a universe that is beyond human, our younger PRIME artists demonstrate a similar reflection on their individual place in space. By bringing together the works of a.o. Angel Vergara, Kurt Ralske, Otto Boll, Lucia Bru, Markus Brunetti, Renato Nicolodi and Kimsooja, our stand will be centred around the concept of man’s relationship with space.