ROBERT YASUDA

ROBERT YASUDA TRANSPARENT & TRANSLUCENT

SUNDARAM TAGORE NEW YORK

FEBRUARY 2 – 25, 2023

JUNCTiON

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 55 x 34 inches/139.7 x 86.4 cm

Robert Yasuda (b. 1940) is known for luminous multi-panel works on carved wood that transmit and transform light. The New York-based artist’s latest body of work is a culmination of his decadeslong exploration of perception, light and space. On view are atmospheric paintings rooted in his early encounters with nature in Hawaii where he was born and raised.

Yasuda’s iridescent paintings are composed of translucent veil-like fields of color layered on slabs of wood that protrude from the wall or nestle into corners. Depending on where you stand, the surfaces of the paintings shift in color and temperature. “For many people, looking at a painting for 20 seconds can be extremely long but these are pieces that reveal themselves over time,” says Yasuda, who invites viewers to pause and immerse themselves in the work in order to perceive these subtle transformations.

Several of the works on view feature aqueous expanses of blues evoking the ocean. In others, sensuous swathes of paint evoke sunsets or the iridescent lining of seashells. “My entire childhood I saw myriad greens in the countryside of Hawaii and I spent a great deal of time diving…These works are connected with that point of view and the process of meditating on nature,” says Yasuda. Waialeale, 2022—which translates as “rippling water” in Hawaiian—is a nod to a towering green mountain range on the island of Kauai, among

TRANSPARENT & TRANSLUCENT

PAYAL UTTAM

the wettest spots on earth thanks to copious rainfall. Painted with emerald green pierced with faint glimmers of yellow, the rectangular work has a narrow horizontal blue panel affixed to the top calling to mind the relationship between the area’s lush vegetation and rainwater. Other works, such as Chronology, 2022, a pale-yellow plank-like painting set in a corner, invites viewers to engage as they might with a sculptural object. Yasuda has constructed it so that it casts a reflected glow of multi-hued light onto the surrounding walls.

Yasuda begins creating such works by shaping wooden panels, which are up to two inches thick, with chisels and grinders. Softening harsh vertical lines, he introduces bowed and gently sloping edges as well as sharply upturned corners. After painting a base layer onto the wood, he wraps the wood in diaphanous cotton. Adding as many as 40 layers of pearlescent acrylic paint, he suspends the fabric amid layers of luminous color. Often combining several panels, with intricately wrought and detailed seams, he mounts his work on cradle-like structures that push them away from the wall.

Early in his career, inspired by the works of Asian art on view at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and by subsequent travels through India, Japan and Southeast Asia, Yasuda veered away from the Western notion of painting functioning like a

window onto the world. Instead, he was drawn to Eastern approaches to picture-making and framing including Japanese scroll paintings and Chinese paintings resting on ornately carved stands. Having spent time shaping and sanding wood surfboards in his youth, he naturally gravitated toward working with wood and began experimenting with transparent fabric and acrylic paint on thick wooden boards.

Yasuda started working with thin washes of acrylic paint in the 1970s soon after the medium became commercially available. Although acrylic resins were initially used for industrial and construction purposes, it wasn’t long before innovative artists such as Yasuda began mining the possibilities of the medium for fine art. “Throughout the ’60s, I had been painting in oil which has a long drying time and limited the idea of layers. Typically, it could take a year to get a dozen or so layers but suddenly it was possible to do so much more,” he says.

In addition to the possibilities that acrylic afforded him, New York’s cheap rental market during that era unlocked even more exciting creative opportunities. He found himself for the first time with the luxury of space, working in a sprawling loft studio. The high ceilings and long walls allowed him to experiment with scale in dramatic fashion. Notable exhibitions of monumental sitespecific paintings soon followed.

In 1975 he exhibited his first leaning-wall painting, measuring 12 feet by 26 feet, at the legendary Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, followed by four more exhibitions with Parsons over the years. In 1976, the groundbreaking curator Alanna Heiss commissioned two similarly monumental leaning walls for Rooms, her inaugural exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1).

Three years later, Yasuda erected a 10-foot high white-toned painting that spanned 30 feet in length in the courtyard of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., along with two others flanking the staircase leading to the building’s rotunda. Leaning against colonnades, they hovered between architecture and installation, sculpture and painting. These pieces, and other such public projects at New York’s Clocktower Gallery and under the Brooklyn Bridge to name just a few, had an immersive effect, their proportions seeming to shift depending upon the viewing angle.

The lush multi-panel paintings on view in Transparent & Translucent have emerged from Yasuda’s more than sixty years of experimentation with process, materials, scale and from his innovative techniques shaping and sculpting his wood supports. He has masterfully distilled all of it into minimalist canvases that make you to stop, look and linger. As curator Marshall N. Price once surmised, “Yasuda’s paintings are calming to the eye, and may provide, if only temporarily, a respite to the cacophony of contemporary existence.”1

Payal Uttam is a freelance journalist who has been covering art and design across the globe for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Artsy, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and The Art Newspaper. Alongside contributing to various publications, she edits and writes catalogue essays and art market reports. Previously based in Paris, she now divides her time between Hong Kong and Singapore.

1 Marshall N. Price, “Robert Yasuda’s Slow Reveal,” Robert Yasuda (2013 exhibition catalogue published by Sundaram Tagore Gallery).

Robert Yasuda in his SoHo studio, New York, 2023, photograph by Judith Murray

AMAKUA 2021, acrylic on fabric on wood, 72 x 72 inches/182.9 x 182.9 cm

BEACh BREAK 2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 47 x 29 inches/119.4 x 73.7 cm

BOUNDARY

2010-2020, acrylic on fabric on wood, 80 x 50 inches/203.2 x 127 cm

ChRONOLOGY

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 80 x 5.5 inches/203.2 x 14 cm

PELE 2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 31 x 47 inches/78.7 x 119.4 cm

VERGE

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 7 x 61 inches/17.8 x 154.9 cm

KANALOA

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 34.5 x 60 inches/87.6 x 152.4 cm

MALUhiA 2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 18 x 14 inches/45.7 x 35.6 cm

PiPELiNE

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 40 x 30 inches/101.6 x 76.2 cm

PONO

2023, acrylic on fabric on wood, 11 x 58 inches/27.9 x 147.3 cm

MOLOKAi

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 24 x 32 inches/61x 81.3 cm

NA hOA 2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 55 x 16 inches/139.7 x 40.6 cm

PO LANi

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 31 x 40 inches/78.7 x 101.6 cm

LOKAhi

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 41 x 38 inches/104.1 x 96.5 cm

WAiALEALE

2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 45 x 30 inches/114.3 x 76.2 cm

WAiANAE 2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 80 x 122 inches/203.2 x 309.9 cm

EViDENCE

2018, acrylic on fabric on wood, 5 x 6 inches/12.7 x 15.2 cm

ALOhA 2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 48 x 32 inches/122 x 81.3 cm

WAiMEA 2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 22 x 53 inches/55.9 x 134.6 cm

Robert Yasuda in is his SoHo studio, New York, 2023, photograph by Judith Murray

ROBERT YASUDA

Robert Yasuda is an American painter born in Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii in 1940. He is known for his subtle paintings exploring ephemeral qualities of light and visual perception. Yasuda moved from Hawaii to New York City in 1958 where he attended Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, completing a BFA and MFA and immersing himself in the work of New York School artists.

Early in his career, Yasuda sought to create distinctly sculptural works that functioned more as objects in space than flat, illusionary surfaces. His first major exhibitions as a young artist include solo shows at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger (Zurich and St. Moritz), 1968 and 1969, and in 1975, the first of five shows at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York. He went on to install monumental site-specific works at P.S.1Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Clocktower Gallery, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and most recently at MoMA PS1 in the 2016 exhibition Forty

Yasuda has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His works are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; The New York Public Library; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas among others.

Yasuda works and lives in New York City and Sugarloaf Key, Florida.

SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERIES

The gallery has been representing established and emerging artists from around the world since 2000, showing work that is aesthetically and intellectually rigorous, infused with humanism and art historically significant. The gallery specializes in paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations with a strong emphasis on materiality. Our artists cross cultural and national boundaries, synthesizing Western visual language with forms, techniques and philosophies from Asia, the Subcontinent and the Middle East. We show this work alongside important work by underrepresented women from the New York School. The gallery also has a robust photography program that includes some of the world’s most noted photographers.

NEW YORK

542 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001 • tel 212 677 4520 gallery@sundaramtagore.com

SINGAPORE

5 Lock Road 01-05, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108933 • tel 65 6694 3378 singapore@sundaramtagore.com

LONDON

4 Cromwell Place, London, SW7 2JE gallery@sundaramtagore.com

President and Curator: Sundaram Tagore Senior Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor Director, New York: Kathryn McSweeney Senior Registrar: Julia Occhiogrosso Designer: Russell Whitehead Editorial support: Kieran Doherty

Robert Yasuda’s studio assitants: Katie Svensson Spencer Nichols

WWW.SUNDARAMTAGORE.COM

ISBN: 978-0-692-23865-3

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover, Waialeale (detail), 2022, acrylic on fabric on wood, 45 x 30 inches/114.3 x 76.2 cm