Yamada Masaaki

“Silence has limitless power inside the work. Confront silence. Repeatedly pursue white”¹

Masaaki Yamada’s ritualistic, meditative abstraction illuminates a sublime internal logic based upon relationships of purity in colour, gesture, and form. The present work offers a distinctive glance into Yamada’s oeuvre encompassing compositions that consist exclusively of linear forms and loose, yet confident brushstrokes retained within specific colour fields. While Yamada's works do not offer any explicit social or political commentary, they are a product of the artist’s negotiation of the residual fears of war, and the “search of a way to somehow survive in a real world over which chaos reigned…”¹ In a sense, Yamada’s abstraction engages with this inherent post-war solicitude.

The result is an immense series of calming, delicate works such as the untitled work from his series Work B (see Lot 4) and the present lot Work C.p 266, which both comprise rectilinear colour planes and grids that assume their own individual character and significance upon the surface of the canvas. Yamada’s technical and intellectual approach to abstraction made his work a rarity in postwar Japan, and his repertoire has been linked to that of Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967), Agnes Martin (1912-2004) and Ellsworth Kelly (1923-20015), key proponents of American abstraction. Born in Tokyo in 1929, Yamada began exhibiting professionally when he was just nineteen years old, and by the mid-1960s his work begun to garner international appeal in a spectrum of overseas exhibitions including those at Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, The National Museum of Art, Stockholm, Galerie Denise René, Paris and at the 19^th São Paolo Biennial, São Paolo.

Yamada's work is fundamentally bound by its reduction of form, its chromatically coordinated colour schemes and its spatial, linear planes. In its quietude the viewer loses any sense of temporal dimensions, and is consequently privy to Masaaki Yamada’s ephemeral and transitory painterly realm.

1. Nakabayashi Kazuo et. al, ed., endless: The Paintings of Yamada Masaaki, (Tokyo, 2016), p. 176.

2. ibid., p. 265.