LOT DETAILS

Materials:

Oil on canvas

Size Notes:

framed dimensions 52 x 64 inches

Markings:

Signed, titled, and dated on the reverse: Domoto / Solution de Continuité/ 1965 - No 22 / Tokyo

Condition:

Unlined canvas; Scattered minor chips to paint throughout, notable quarter inch loss of paint, center right and center left; two minor quarter inch punctures to canvas along lower right edge; areas of craquelure to the darker pigments; scattered impression marks on the canvas.

Provenance:

Martha Jackson Gallery, New York; Private collection, Los Angeles, California. Hisao Domoto's conventional artistic foundation in mid-century Kyoto hardly forecast his eventual role as a leader in the Japanese vanguard. His connoisseur father collected antique Japanese painting, calligraphy, and ceramics, and his artist uncle, Domoto Insho, specialized in traditional Japanese painting, nihonga (landscapes and figures rendered in delicate ink washes on silk or scrolls). Following in his uncle's footsteps, Domoto trained in nihonga from 1945-49 at the Kyoto City University of Arts, and several of his early works were selected for the Nitten, or Japan Fine Arts Exhibition. In 1952 Domoto traveled with his uncle to Italy, Spain, and France and was so mesmerized with Western art that he decided in 1954 to establish his studio on the Left Bank in Paris. Here, he met the critic and art dealer Michel Tapié, champion of Art informel (Art Without Form), Europe's version of Abstract Expressionism. At the time, Informalist pioneers such as Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu, Pierre Soulages, and Antoni Tàpies were celebrating expressive, spontaneous, and gestural painting, independent of representation and open to interpretation. In this avant-garde think-tank of Paris, Domoto became close friends with Informalists Soulages and Zao Wou-ki, and he met other key modernists studying abroad such as Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and Isamu Noguchi. Domoto's successful first solo exhibition at the Stadler Gallery in Paris in 1957 put him on the modernist map; in that same year, he participated in a group show organized by Tapié, "L'art Mondial Contemporain à Tokoyo," which introduced him to fellow Japanese abstractionists from the "Gutai" movement. The following year, Domoto became an international name: he collaborated with Informel and Gutai artists on an exhibition in Osaka, "The International Art of a New Era: USA, Japan, Europe." He also ventured to New York, where he befriended Abstract Expressionists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and the gallerist Martha Jackson, who represented him for decades. Part of his famous Solutions of Continuity series from the early 1960s, the present lot foregrounds Domoto's unique synthesizing of Eastern nihonga and Western Informel influences. In this series, Domoto created an impastoed "screen" of vertical and horizontal strips pushed back to reveal smooth, circular patterns beneath. The overlaid screen evokes traditional Japanese paper, as well as Informel gesture painting; similarly, the circles beneath, while fundamentally abstract, recall the calligraphic moons of nihonga landscapes. Critics praised the push-pull of negative and positive space that Domoto achieved in this series by contrasting light and dark tones and impastoed and flat brushwork. Tapié, for example, described Solutions of Continuity as "an ambiguous space that subsumes both the dialectical attainments of Western mathematicians in topological composition and the intuitive properties that Eastern painting has carefully upheld down through centuries. Which is to say that, no matter how complex, Domoto's paintings are always elegant and intuitive, yet have the precision of clearly delineated proofs" (Michel Tapié, text for Domoto's solo exhibition at the Minami Gallery, Tokyo,1960). Indeed, Domoto's modernist legacy is his blending of Western bravado and structure with Eastern lyricism and fluidity, a pictorial yin-yang.