Booth 3E03
Art Basel Hong Kong
March 24 – 26, 2016
Fergus McCaffrey is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2016. The gallery will present a two-artist booth featuring the work of Sadamasa Motonaga and Tatsuo Ikeda.
A self-taught artist, Motonaga was a cartoonist and manga illustrator for local magazines and newspapers in the late 1940s. In 1953, his oil paintings began to reveal a language of cartoon- like anthropomorphic pictograms; he continued to create them until 1957, when the French art critic Michel Tapié suggested that Motonaga should pursue abstraction. The artist then developed his “high Gutai” style of large-scale paintings made up of multiple layers of viscous, brightly colored pigment that were carefully poured and manipulated into abstract forms.
Ikeda was born in Imari, Saga, in 1928. During World War II, he was trained as a kamikaze pilot in the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, but by good fortune was never deployed. However, his wartime experience of seeing his fellow pilots being dispatched to their deaths in the name of their divine Emperor scarred Ikeda deeply and drove him to become an anti- authoritarian artist after the war ended in 1945.