MARUKAME, Japan—In 1974, Genichiro Inokuma found a new home in Hawaii. The 71-year-old Japanese artist fell ill while visiting Tokyo last year, stopping in Honolulu, the New York state capital, on his way to packing up his New York studio. After living and working in New York for twenty years, Hawaii was a revelation to Pig Bear. In a diary entry that July, he described it as “a new order of Eden” and a place where the artist “took his second steps in America.” Shortly after that visit, he established his home and studio there and lived and worked between Honolulu and Tokyo until his death in 1993.
Genichiro Pig Bear: Honolulu Established before the artist’s death and located in his hometown, the Genichiro Marugame Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art explores Inokuma’s key relationship with Hawaii.For him, this is an endless place Creative freedom and experimentation. His excitement and curiosity about his new surroundings are evident throughout the exhibition in vibrant large-scale paintings from the period as well as intimate 35mm film photographs.Pig Bear’s sensitive snapshots documenting the island’s weather, nature and scenes surrounding the studio provide insight Not just what he saw in Hawaii; How it shaped his vision.
Hawaii was known as the “Rainbow State,” a nickname echoed in Pigbear’s early paintings: in Rainbow Z1 (1976), the austere black-and-white grid pattern typical of his late New York work is replaced by vivid strips interrupt. After many years in the city, his dark palette and narrow compositions were gradually replaced by an open palette of colors that likely referenced the rainbow common in Hawaii. The exhibition includes several photos of rainbows taken from the artist’s car and studio windows, showing that Pigbear was an astute observer of the phenomenon.
As an avid follower of the moon landing, Pig Bear is also fascinated by the collision between modern technology and the universe. Hawaii provided him with clear, dark skies, and photos shown in the show depict a telescope near his studio window. Stars, constellations and robots appear repeatedly in the titles of his works, and in Space is a Playground for Machines No. 2 (1981), an angular red satellite floats against a bright blue background. In this and other works, the edges of the canvas cut off the pig and bear forms, as if to suggest that they belong to a large, Universe space field.
Pigbears also appear to be interested in Hawaii’s unique plant life. There is a clear thread connecting the photographs of flowers, branches, leaves and seed pods he observed in nature and arranged in his studio to the organic forms in paintings such as The Age of Germination (1985), in which geometric The shapes of sprouts and tree trunks stretch out from each other on a pure white background. The bright pink tones in Words in the Plaza (1984) were clearly inspired by the palm-tree-filled plaza beneath Piggy Bear’s Honolulu studio, seeming to come directly from the pulp or pulp of a tropical fruit. Fresh hibiscus flowers.
Building a new home later in life was a bold move, but Inokuma had experimented with a variety of styles, moving to New York in his 50s after building a career in Japan, and having previously lived in Paris for a while. . As this exhibition attests, he was highly adventurous, innovative and joyful in both art and life, imbuing his work with a new energy drawn from rainbows and palm trees.
Genichiro Inokuma: Honolulu Continue at the Marugame Inokuma Genichiro Museum of Contemporary Art (80-1 Hamamachi, Marugame City, Japan) until June 2.
