NYAB Event - Kikuji Kawada “The Last Cosmology”

Kikuji Kawada “The Last Cosmology”

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs

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L. Parker Stephenson Photographs presents master Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada (b. 1933) and the first solo exhibition of his work in the United States. Kawada, co-founder of the photographers’ cooperative VIVO with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe and others, is best known outside Japan for his seminal book and series Chizu (The Map), published in 1965. Part of The Map series was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1974 exhibition, New Japanese Photography, curated by John Szarkowski and an entire room will be devoted to it in the Tate Modern’s upcoming exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography.

While The Map addressed psychological issues of national concern in the era following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Kawada’s series The Last Cosmology (1969-1999), on view at the Gallery, presents personal perceptions that echo evolution on a universal scale. Starting in the late 1960s and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kawada raised his eyes beyond the stained ceiling of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome to the heavens above and the world around and beyond. The dizzying yet cohesive array of subjects, printed in rich intense tones that virtually glow, convey a sense of unease, imbalance, loss and questioning. Like previous civilizations, we are left to wonder about connections between heavenly dramas and terrestrial circumstances.

I was born at the beginning of the Shōwa Era [1926-1989]. There was a great war during my boyhood and then I lived during the period of re-construction and growth and now I slowly approach the evening of life. Through these photographs the cosmology is an illusion of the firmament. At the same time it includes the reality of an era and also the cosmology of a changing heart.
- Kikuji Kawada

Exhibitions of The Last Cosmology have been held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2009) and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2003). Images from this series will be exhibited in Europe later this year by Michael Hoppen Gallery and a book on the work will be published by MACK in 2015. Over the past 50 years Kawada’s photographs have also been presented in exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery, London; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; the International Center of Photography, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and elsewhere. His photographs are in the permanent collections of most of those institutions as well as (outside Japan) those of the Center for Creative Photography, AZ; Musée National d’Art Modern, Paris; and Princeton University Art Museum, NJ.