Chiyu Uemae

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition by Japanese artist Chiyu Uemae (Kyoto, 1920 - 2018) in collaboration with the artist’s family and estate.

Uemae was one of the Gutai Art Association’s original members who remained in the group until its dissolution in 1972. While Uemae’s oil paintings and mixed media works from the Gutai period have been exhibited in various museums worldwide, his post-Gutai works have rarely shown outside Japan. This exhibition presents an overview of his Gutai pointillist works from the 1950s and 1960s, a selection of “Kigumi” wooden sculptures from the early 1970s, a collection of impressive “Nui” works from the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as a selection of oil paintings from the later years featuring his characteristic square patterns.

Uemae initially studied nanga, Chinese-style literati painting, before joining Gutai as one its founding members. Much appreciated by the group’s founder Jiro Yoshihara and his co-founding members Shozo Shimamoto and Kazuo Shiraga, Uemae can be considered as a unique Gutai member. Yoshihara insisted that “what is most important, is not the result, but the process of leaving one’s mark on the material”. To him, what mattered was the spiritual and not the material, the object and not the subject. Uemae was different. Between 1954 and 1964, he used a pallet knife to create tiny fragments of oil paint and produce paintings of microscopic detail. These works are characterised by repetitive gestures and vivid colours, such as red and yellow, which he superposes. He meticulously filled the entire canvas with these lines and dots. In these tick paintings, the so-called “auto-part”, Uemae aimed for the tactile more than for strictly visual appreciation. The process appeared to be very time-consuming and elaborate. Shimamoto wrote about this in 1984: “He [Uemae] would paint dots of paint, creating layer after layer, one on top of the other. He painted dots of red paint and then dots of yellow paint so the bottom colour disappeared… These works communicate with a completely different forcefulness from those that are more straightforward.”

French critic Michel Tapié introduced Gutai to European collectors and museums, and he had a high regarded for Uemae’s work after having seen his solo exhibition in 1966. Tapié wrote: “His style of painting has remained remarkably consistent and on track… Without going to excess, Uemae continues to move sure-footedly, step-by-step, along his own path.”

Uemae was deeply interested in the evidence of material, discovering new expressions for items such as match sticks, strings, and cloth, making no distinction between vigorous painting and sculpture. His larger works are laced with extreme applications of paint as a cohesive image. They are also purely about the material, such as oil paint, occupying the surface of the canvas, rigorously applied layer after layer, with small particles of hues, refracting colours.

As of 1975, Uemae began using cloth and thread. He named this series “Nui”, or “Stitch works”. For the artist, it was a change of materials but the intrinsic search for transformation, applied with passion remained the same. He said, “I have created these Stitch works (Nui) as a work of pure art, because using oil paints or fibres makes no difference to me. They are both simply materials.” (from “a Reply to a Certain Person”, published on November 30, 1998)

Uemae obtained the skills for stitching during an apprenticeship at a kimono cleaning shop, where he was sent at twelve years old. His colleagues praised him for his fine and delicate stitching skills. The choice of this material and technique for non-figurative works was therefore a natural step for him. His “Nui” works are the core of his post-Gutai works; the encounter of the material and abstract art. From 1975 to 1997, he created 176 “Nui” works, of which many were reworked at a later stage.

Like Sadaharu Horio and Chu Enoki, Uemae was never trained at an art college with an academic curriculum. They were laborers engaged in a factory, and they continued working there to earn money for a living until their retirement. But they never stopped creating art and considered it as a necessity and an urge in life. Distinct to other Gutai members, Uemae continued embracing the idea of beauty, while for the others the innovation and originality of the expression were what counted the most.

In his later years, Uemae returned to oil painting and repeatedly used multilayered square patterns in his compositions. They became his signature style, and he used them in various colours and sizes. The origin is probably rooted in his childhood in Kyoto, as they remind us of the “Ichimatsu” patterns — or check patterns — found in the wheat barns in the Kyoto temples.

Uemae’s wide-ranging productivity during his seventy-year-career is remarkable. From the creation of two-dimensional works, composed of an accumulation of paint by painting knife in his early years, to the sensitive stitches in his “Nui” works, to sculptural works made of wood, to his later paintings with the square patterns, his investigation of materiality and physicality of the paint, is persistent, focussed, and remarkable.