NYAB Event - Eikoh Hosoe “Curated Body 1959-1970”

Eikoh Hosoe “Curated Body 1959-1970”

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects

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Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery presents “Eikoh Hosoe: Curated Body 1959-1970,” featuring a selection of vintage and modern prints by the master Japanese photographer, Eikoh Hosoe. This exhibition is organized in association with Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

Eikoh Hosoe (b. 1933) is widely acknowledged to be a pioneer of expressionistic post-WWII Japanese photography. Throughout an oeuvre spanning over fifty years, Hosoe has explored the human body’s physicality as a subject that reveals a shifting interior landscape of dreams and desires. The exhibition focuses on black-and-white photographs from Hosoe’s two seminal series Man and Woman (1959-1960) and Embrace (1969-1970). Produced ten years apart, these two series bookend a prolific decade of artistic production, solidifying Hosoe’s bold and dramatic aesthetics into a clear statement against the “objective” realism which was then the dominant photographic convention in Japan.

Permeated by dark, obscure images of naked bodies, Man and Woman is inspired by Tatsumi Hijikata, the charismatic dancer and founder of Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness). Using Hijikata and other dancers as his models, Hosoe’s photo narrative evokes a hybrid myth of Western and Eastern rituals. The tensions arising from the model’s gaze, stripped body parts, and bodily interactions with the opposite gender serve to meditate on questions of life and death. Embrace, by comparison, testifies to Hosoe’s ability to compose austere yet soulful poetry out of the pure and uniquely expressive forms of the human body. Reducing the model’s flesh to a calm abstract contemplation of body contours, Hosoe then juxtaposes soft and muscular overtones, generating powerful illusions that bore deeply into one’s subconscious. Hosoe initially shot the prototypes of Embrace shortly after Man and Woman, but after discovering a striking resemblance to Bill Brandt’s iconic “Perspectives sur le Nu” (1961), Hosoe suspended production. Years later he completed the series in the studio. While Embrace’s refined aesthetics extracted the essence of Hosoe’s vision, Man and Woman laid the foundation for the dynamic style that has defined all of the artist’s subsequent projects.

Born in 1933 in Yamagata prefecture, the northern part of Japan, Eikoh Hosoe came of age during a volatile social climate when Japan was emerging from postwar trauma and poverty to a renewed sense of prosperity and concomitant identity. He began photography at age thirteen and went on to study at the Tokyo College of Photography. In the mid-and late-50s, the critic Tatsuo Fukushima produced Hosoe’s first exhibition “An American Girl in Tokyo” and continued to promote him in a pivotal group show, “The Eyes of the Ten.” Hosoe’s first critical recognition came when he was awarded New Photographer of the Year by the Japanese Photo Critics Association for “Man and Woman”(1960). His international fame was established by Barakei - Ordeal by Roses (1962) featuring Yukio Mishima and Kamaitachi (1969) featuring Tatsumi Hijikata. Hosoe also directed an experimental film “Navel and A-Bomb” (1960) and worked with Kon Ichikawa on the legendary documentary “Olympic Games in Tokyo” (1965). Hosoe’s work has been internationally exhibited and collected by major national and international institutions. The artist has published over fifty monographs as well as several essays and books about his own photographs. Hosoe is the first Japanese recipient of the Lucy Award (2006) in the “Visionary” category.

[Image: EIKOH HOSOE “Man and Woman #24” (1960) Gelatin silver print, printed c1960, 5” x 8” [12cm x 20cm]]