Shusaku Arakawa - ORIGINAL signed & inscribed ink drawing in book about his art - PADIGLIONE D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA, hardbound, 1984, containing 34 b/w illustrations, 10.5 x 10.75 in. Very good condition. We guarantee the authenticity of this drawing.Shusaku Arakawa - Dadaist Conceptualist Shusaku Arakawa was born in Nagoya, Japan, on July 6, 1936. He studied medicine and mathematics at Tokyo University from 1954 to 1958, and art at the Musashino College of Art, Tokyo, before completing his degree he left Japan. In 1958 he began submitting paintings to the Yomiuri Independent exhibitions and in 1961 held his first solo exhibition at Mudo Gallery, Tokyo. In 1960, he started a neo-Dada group, programming Happenings, and later gaining recognition with a series of boxes. In 1962, he came to New York and created a new series, "Diagram," in which silhouettes of combs, footprints, tennis rackets, arrows and refrigerators were arranged on canvas. Gradually he replaced the silhouettes with words only. Throughout the 1960s he had a number of solo exhibitions at Dwan Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, at Galerie Schmela, Dsseldorf, and Galleria Schwartz, Milan. In 1966 he was given his first museum exhibition at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, and in 1970 represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. During the 1970s museums featured his work throughout Europe and the United States and in 1981 a large retrospective was organized by the Stdtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. With his wife, the poet Madeline H. Gins, Arakawa has also published books that "parallel the preoccupations of his paintings," in particular The Mechanism of Meaning (1979). In 1991 a retrospective was organized by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Arakawa and Gins increasingly concentrate on collaborative installation pieces and architectural design, such as the Utopian City of Reversible destiny seen at the Guggenheim Soho in 1997. Arakawa denies, like all Conceptualists and Pop Art neo-Dadaists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, the artist's hand in his paintings. Expressionistic or emotive marks on the canvas are few, serving only as a foil to the deadpan, depersonalized, mechanical style. Paintings such as "Out of distance/Out of texture" appear to be aimed at the intellect devoid of feeling for life, poetry or spirituality."

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