Ralph Iwamoto: Octagonal Permutations by Hollis Taggart

OR “HOW ONLY A FORMULARIZED ART CAN BE FORMULALESS”

EMILY CHUN

God, as the Pythagoreans said, is a geometer— but not an algebraist.

— Simone Weil, in a letter to her brother André in 1940

Ralph Iwamoto with his painting Calculation-C (1980), photo by Steve Wada, courtesy of the Estate of Ralph Iwamoto

In 1957, thirty-year-old Japanese-American artist Ralph Iwamoto began working at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as a security guard on the second floor of a sprawling Picasso exhibition. At the time, Iwamoto was honing his style of floating forms inspired by corals, cubism, and ukiyo-e, and relished the opportunity to look at and ambiently absorb Picasso’s works for hours each day. After the Picasso exhibition, he continued working there until 1960, befriending fellow guards Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, and Sol LeWitt, three artists who would go on to form the core of the Minimalist movement during the 1960s. Iwamoto later recalled being tremendously inspired by these artists, and their friendship would radically change the direction of his practice. Characterized by industrial processes, an aspirational withdrawal of the artist’s individual touch, and rigorous reductivism evacuated of any representational content, Minimalism deeply appealed to Iwamoto, who saw in the movement (which was at that point still deviant from the academy and not yet codified into a “style”) a means through which he could explore and express universal truths.

For Iwamoto, this emotional ambition of transcoding transcendence into geometry moved him to experiment with pure color and form in the early 1960s. From 1965 to 1968, he created a series of geometrically shaped canvases whose edges are activated by right-angled lines. Not satisfied with these shaped canvases, Iwamoto alighted on the octagon as his favored motif, his insignia. The octagon would

occupy his artistic output for nearly a quarter of a century, an obsession to which this exhibition testifies. Spanning the period from 1970 to 1992, the works in this show foreground how Iwamoto inexhaustibly mined ways to syncopate a grid through seemingly endless permutations of an octagon.

His first series with the octagon was called “QuarOctagon,” or four octagons set in each quadrant of a square, as in Red Blue Move (4 Octagons) (1970, pl. 9). Four cobalt octagons compress into the parameters of the canvas, symmetrically dividing up the composition. A cherry red, off-kilter square obscures most of our view of the four octagons, but we still get just enough information from the edges peeking out from under the red shape to infer the existence of the octagons, like the shadows of a penumbra. This aesthetic notion of the margins-tell-all, and how the action and true protagonist (the octagons) reside at the edges—not in the center—is hypostatized again and again in Iwamoto’s works, even when he moves beyond the four-octagon composition.

By 1973, he expanded his compositions to include three-by-three grids of octagons, as in Foley Square (1973, pl. 1) and Herald Square (1973, pl. 3), maintaining the general format of a looming central form obscuring octagons that are only discernible through their centrifugally banished edges. More intricate arrangements followed in 1977, such as eight-by-eight grids of QuarOctagons. Through the 1980s, Iwamoto complexified his paintings

left: Sol LeWitt, Untitled, from the series Forms Derived from a Cube (set of 24), 1982. Aquatint and etching, sheet: 20 11/16 × 21 in. (52.5 × 53.3 cm), plate: 17 11/16 × 17 15/16 in. (45 × 45 cm).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Norman B. Colp and Marsha Stern-Colp, 1992 right: Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918. Oil on canvas, 31 1/4 × 31 1/4 in. (79.4 × 79.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange)

even further into seventeen-by-twentyone grids of QuarOctagons that appear to be multiplying and metastasizing in a frenzy, possibly reflecting the currents of jazz, punk, rock and roll, and the “razzle dazzle of Times Square” that the artist cited as important influences during this decade.

In the horizontally oriented White Shuttles (1975–82, pl. 16), which Iwamoto dedicated to Sol LeWitt, the “squares” (which are actually condensed three-by-three grids of octagons) rhythmically unfurl from left to right, each iteration marked by additive black bands and right angles. Iwamoto’s first octagonal studies were compelled by LeWitt’s compositions of vertical and horizontal lines and right angles in all their variations. It is telling that out of his three MoMA guard friends—Flavin, Ryman, and LeWitt—Iwamoto was most drawn to

LeWitt, arguably the most conceptual of the group. (Iwamoto would go on to work on some of LeWitt’s early wall drawings.)

In contrast to the minimalist works of artists like Flavin and Donald Judd that assert their material presence and thereness in such a literal way that drains them of any metaphysical longing, the work of LeWitt stands out from that of other minimalists in its overtly philosophical quality. As art historian Robert Rosenblum noted in his differentiation of LeWitt from other minimalists:

Even the materials of most minimal art— [Carl] Andre’s bricks, Flavin’s fluorescent tubes, Judd’s plexiglass and plywood— are somehow, for all their plainness and clarity, too literal, too palpable for LeWitt, who seeks out rather the most abstract

top left: Group exhibition invitation for Black & White, The Gallery at Sixth and Sixth, 2008

top right: Solo exhibition invitation for Black & White, The Gallery at Sixth and Sixth, 2008

bottom: Solo exhibition invitation for The Octagon Concept, Westbest Gallery, 1974

looking materials, or ideally, nonmaterials, to render, in [Donald] Kuspit’s felicitous phrase, “the look of thought.”

Iwamoto, too, took up the mechanical impersonality of the octagon but yoked it to a desire for the universal and the absolute, in the way of Kazimir Malevich, whose Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) he saw at MoMA while working as a guard. For the poetic Malevich, the creator of the first Suprematist composition in 1913, a logical evolution toward reductive, geometric art was inevitable, and bound up with a kind of inward, utopian transcendence. Iwamoto, who spiritually carried Malevich’s work with him his whole life, also sought ways in which one might find freedom through the repetition and irreducibility of forms.

It bears noting that many artists in postwar New York were busy creating repetitive works, which the critic Barbara Rose took up in her now-canonical essay “ABC Art” for Art in America in 1965. Identifying the prevailing trends of the then-small art world (which she retroactively approximated to around 500 people), Rose enthusiastically registered the importance of the “empty, repetitious, uninflected art” then being produced by dancers, composers, musicians, visual artists, and poets as a much-needed correction to the two decades of “unbridled subjectivity” and “excesses of painterliness” instantiated by the Abstract Expressionist style.

Threading together works as far-ranging as Warhol’s silkscreens of serial images of dead celebrities, Robert Morris’s repeated mirrored boxes, and Erik Satie’s repetition of the same fragment over 840 times in his piano piece “Vexations,” Rose wrote in the essay: “To find variety in repetition where only the nuance alters seems more and more to interest artists, perhaps in reaction to the increasing uniformity of the environment and repetitiveness of a circumscribed experience.”

This is an apt description of Iwamoto’s geometric works, which use the octagon to “find variety in repetition.” But if his repetition of the octagon feels at all Apollonian or stuffy in its matter-of-factness and suppression of personality, the visual results are far from a nihilistic denial of the world or himself. Iwamoto liked to work very methodologically in series, composing meticulous compositions, but somehow built in room for hints of Dionysian disarray, especially in his later works that shimmer and revel in a complete excess of repetitive octagonal fervor. Take, for example, Dominoes, Opus 27 (1987, pl. 14), a grid composed of thirteen-by-fifteen lines of “squares,” each of which is, upon closer inspection, a QuarOctagon. Apprehended at once, the painting resembles a chaotic circuit board, each QuarOctagon evoking a protoSIM card and speaking a different code.

In a 1979 article in the journal October, art historian Rosalind Krauss famously theorized the grid as the quintessential

Iwamoto in his studio in front of his painting Inter Reds (1975), 1976. photo by Dave Kohler

Iwamoto in his studio in front of his painting Earth Umber (1976), 1976. photo by Dave Kohler

modernist emblem, “discovered” by Malevich, Mondrian, the cubists, and de Stijl. The grid constituted a radical break in the history of art and announced, among other things, “modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse . . . flattened, geometricized, ordered, [the grid] is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.” Iwamoto’s grids, such as Dominoes, Opus 27 or Raven Scroll #3 (1982, pl. 7) repel narrative to be sure, but do they disavow nature in the way Krauss suggests? The culmination of Iwamoto’s use of the octagons as embodied in these works imagines otherwise; these grids look to be perceptually flickering, twitching, misfiring, in the way that nature (and humans) do, as if they are exteriorizing some fundamental system malfunction that lurks within all of us. It is the very regularity of the grid that allows Iwamoto to improvise and produce these effects that transcend the grid and override its “antinatural,” overly logical conceit. Indeed, Krauss observes this sort of paradox at the heart of the grid: “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”

Perhaps this is one way to think about the continuities between Iwamoto’s earlier fantastical, surrealist work which at first glance seem to have very little

in common with the later octagonal, geometric work that is the focus of this exhibition. As noted, his mature octagon works like Dominoes Opus 27 and Capriccio (1983, pl. TK) resemble grids gone awry, their seemingly scientific, granular attention to the octagon all but compromised by the frenetic variations and glitches electrifying them. They look untrammeled, much like the overgrowth of wild foliage in his earlier surrealist paintings.

Existentialism was in the air in the New York art world during the 1960s, as Iwamoto later recalled in his notes. Though it remains unclear the extent to which he engaged with French existentialism, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre might provide an illuminating framework for understanding Iwamoto’s contemporaneous use of the octagon. Sartre believed that human existence is composed of two things: facticity (collection of facts about ourselves) and transcendence (the possibilities we have at our disposal to enact change). Therefore, we are both what we are (factually) as well as what we are not yet (transcendence). What is crucial, Sartre believed, is how these two elements of facticity and transcendence rely on and affect each other. Facts are the parameters within which one lives their life and exercises their freedom. Analogously, Iwamoto shows us how to exercise freedom and change (transcendence) within the constraints of the octagon (fact). In his paintings, the prescription of the octagon—and its

unchangeable fact of having eight sides— is the condition for freedom, improvisation, and repetition. As Ad Reinhardt wrote in 1960, “Only a formularized art can be formulaless.” Iwamoto’s work organizes this reality for us, and the force of his octagons springs from this always-present tension between the facticity of the octagon and infinitely new ways of permutating it.

In that vein, what is the relationship between, on the one hand, the factual specificities of Iwamoto’s life and on the other, his desire for a universal, transcendent formula of art, as briefly mentioned in the beginning of this essay?

Raised by parents who were practicing Buddhists, Iwamoto grew up in Hawai’i in the 1930s and ’40s, a milieu that fused Hawaiian, American, and Japanese values. Iwamoto, a nisei or second-generation Japanese-American, described his childhood as one of a “conflicting household” in terms of clashing cultural values. Mark Pomilio, drawing from interviews with the artist, has situated Iwamoto’s interest in a universal, Minimalist pictorial language within his multicultural upbringing, which made the artist “eager to develop an art form that operated outside the traditions of both Western and Eastern pictorial models.” At the risk of hewing too scrupulously to biographical details and overburdening them with meaning, it makes sense that an artist, who had been hemmed in by cultural specificities for most of his life, would desire to transcend such earth-bound specificities through a

universal, eternal visual language. This does not necessarily mean he saw it as a solution, as Sartre would tell us that it is always a fantasy to try to fully escape one’s facts. I suspect that for Iwamoto, the desire to use a universal language was less a regressive denial of his own lived experiences and more a longing to communicate and impart what is truly essential. Our postmodern sensibilities might bristle at the very idea of universal truths, but we can see there is no metaphysical preciousness here. Rather, Iwamoto’s octagon studies were his attempt to paint his instinctive sense of the way things are—how shapes can simplify and complicate the self. These octagons do not deflect or posture; they disarm us with their simple conviction that there might be a provisional freedom, and aesthetic risk, to be found in repetitively reworking the same shape for over two decades.

Emily Chun is a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Stanford University. She researches American art of the 1980s and ’90s, and how they relate to larger cultural and socioeconomic changes such as the end of the Cold War, increasing globalization and deindustrialization, and the restructuring of the public and private. Her art criticism has appeared in Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail, and she has co-curated exhibitions at the Anderson Collection at Stanford and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

FOLEY SQUARE, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 cm)

COLOR PHASE #13 (BLUE RED ON WHITE), 1975, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 cm)

HERALD SQUARE, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 cm)

ABINGDON SQUARE, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 cm)

GREAT DAWN, 1973, acrylic on cotton in artist’s frame, 18 × 18 in. (45.7 × 45.7 cm) (each panel)

SNOW SCROLL #1 (QUAROCTAGONS – OPUS 1), 1982, acrylic on cotton, 71 1/2 × 71 1/2 in. (181.6 × 181.6 cm)

RAVEN SCROLL #3 (QUAROCTAGONS - OPUS 3), 1982, acrylic on cotton, 71 1/2 × 71 1/2 in. (181.6 × 181.6 cm)

CAPRICCIO (QUAROCTAGONS – OPUS 8), 1983, acrylic on cotton, 71 1/2 × 71 1/2 in. (181.6 × 181.6 cm)

9. RED BLUE MOVE (4 OCTAGONS), 1970, acrylic on cotton, 30 × 30 in. (76.2 × 76.2 cm)

10.

STUDY STEPS #12, 1977, acrylic on cotton, 9 1/2 × 14 1/2 in. (24.1 × 36.8 cm)

11.

STUDY STEPS #18, 1978, acrylic on cotton, 9 1/2 × 14 1/2 in. (24.1 × 36.8 cm)

12.

STUDY STEPS #28, 1978, acrylic on cotton, 9 1/2 × 14 1/2 in. (24.1 × 36.8 cm)

13.

STUDY STEPS #41, 1978, acrylic on cotton, 9 1/2 × 14 1/2 in. (24.1 × 36.8 cm)

DOMINOES OPUS 27, 1987, acrylic on cotton, 67 × 58 in. (170.2 × 147.3 cm)

BLACK SHUTTLES, 1975–82, acrylic on cotton, 9 1/2 × 44 1/2 in. (24.1 × 113 cm)

16.

WHITE SHUTTLES, 1975–82, acrylic on cotton, 9 1/2 × 44 1/2 in. (24.1 × 113 cm)

17. METAMORPHOSIS (E & F), 1992, acrylic on cotton, 36 × 36 in. (91.4 × 91.4 cm) (each panel)

100 VIEWS #75, 1978, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 18 × 24 in. (45.7 × 61 cm)

Ralph Iwamoto, 2008, photo by Masao Katagami, courtesy of the Estate of Ralph Iwamoto

RALPH SHIGETO IWAMOTO

1927 Born in Honolulu

2013

Died in New York City

EDUCATION

1948–49

Art Students League, New York

1949–51

New York State University Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, NY

1951–53

Art Students League, New York

MILITARY SERVICE

1946–48

United States Army, Congressional Gold Medal Award Recipient

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

1955

Fauna Figures, Regina Gallery, New York

1956

Flora Figures, Gima Gallery, Honolulu

1968

Shaped Canvases, Watson Gallery, Elmira College, NY

1973

Shaped Canvases, Westbeth Gallery, New York

1974

The Octagon Concept, Westbeth Gallery, New York

1986

8 Contemporary Asian-American Artists, East/West Fusion Gallery, Sharon, CT

1989

The Concept Form, The Gallery, St. Mary’s College, St. Mary’s City, MD

2001

Drawings and Paintings, Gallery Onetwentyeight, New York

2004

Ralph Iwamoto Works from the ’50s, David Findlay Jr. Fine Art, New York

2008

Ralph Iwamoto (b. 1927): Fifty Years of Abstraction, The Gallery at Sixth and Sixth, Tucson, AZ

2023

Wild Growth: Ralph Iwamoto, Surrealist Works from 1955, Hollis Taggart, New York

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

1948

Artists of Hawaii Group Show, Honolulu Academy of Arts

Group Show, Hale House [City Hall], Honolulu Art Association [Association of Honolulu Artists]

Group Show, Hale House, Hui Nani Artists, Honolulu

1953

4th Annual, Creative Gallery, New York

1954

Group Show, City Center Gallery, New York

1955

Group Show, Contemporary Arts Gallery, New York

1956

56th Annual, Riverside Museum, New York

Contemporary Arts Gallery, New York

1957

22nd Annual, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

1958

Art USA, Madison Square Garden, New York

153rd Annual, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Annual Exhibition, Detroit Institute of Arts

Drawings and Prints, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA

American Art of Our Time, Chrysler Museum of Art, Provincetown, MA

Whitney Annual, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1959

Hawaiian Artists Painting in New York, Columbia Museum of Art, SC

Whitney Annual, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1962

27th Annual, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

1964

Group Show, Kaymar Gallery, New York

1966

And Another, 2nd National Print and Drawing Exhibition, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo

1967

Group Shows, Clara Josephs Gallery, New York (and in 1968 and 1969)

1970

Annual Group Show, Westbeth Gallery, New York

1971

35 Years in Retrospect, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

1976

American Abstract Artists, Ben Shahn Museum, Paterson State College, NJ

40th Anniversary Show, American Abstract Artists, Westbeth Gallery, New York

1978

Small Works, PS1, Project Studio, Long Island City, NY

1979

The American Abstract Artists: The Language of Abstraction, Betty Parsons Gallery and Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York

1980

Small Works, 60 Washington Square East Gallery, New York University, New York

1981

Voices Expressing What Is, Westbeth Gallery, New York

1983

New Direction: Ten JapaneseAmerican Artists in Conjunction with the Enduring Heritage Exhibit, Newark Museum, NJ

Tradition and Today, Bergen County Museum of Art and Science, Paramus, NJ

1984

Invitational Show, Haragiku Museum, Tokyo

Invitational, Contemporary Japanese American Artists, Bloomingdale Gallery, Stamford, CT

1985

Gathering of the Avant-Garde, the Lower East Side 1948 to 1970, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York (also at St. Marks and Henry Street Settlement, New York)

Expo-85, Isetan Gallery, Tokyo

1986

Modern Japanese Abstracts, General Service Administration Gallery, Contemporary Artists Guild, New York

Firehouse Gallery, Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY

1990

25th Anniversary Exhibition, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu

1991

Open Mind: The Sol LeWitt Collection, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

1992

Columbus: Collisio/Convergence of Cultures, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Susann Morse Hilles Gallery of 20th Century Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

1996

Invitational Show, Ise Foundation, JASSI Group, New York

Invitational Show, Japanese American Association, New York

1997

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions: Asian-American Artists and Abstraction, 1945–1970, Taipei Gallery, Taiwanese Cultural Center, New York (two-venue presentation)

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Chicago Cultural Center

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945–1970, Jane Voorhees/ Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers State University, New Brunswick, NJ

1998

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Kaohsiung Museum of Art, Taipei, Taiwan

Asian Traditions/ Modern Expressions, Bedford Gallery Regional Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles (two-venue presentation)

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

1999

American and European Art from 1900 to the Present, Zimmerli Museum of Art, Rutgers State University, New Brunswick, NJ

Contemporary European and American Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Senshu Museum of Art, Akita, Japan

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Fukuoka Asian Museum, Fukuoka City, Japan

Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions, Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kochi City, Shikoku, Japan

2000

Invitational Show, Japanese American Association, New York

Recent Acquisitions, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu

2001

Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Altitude, Gallery

Onetwentyeight, New York

Paintings and Drawings, Westbeth Gallery, New York

2002

Enriched by Diversity, The Art of Hawaii, Inaugural Exhibition of Artists from 1940 to the Present, Hawaii State Art Museum, Honolulu

Recent Acquisitions, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu

500 Works on Paper: 1922–2002, Gary Snyder Fine Art Gallery, New York

Eastern Essence: Abstraction by Asian American Artists 1950–1970, Gary Snyder Fine Art, New York

Ad Infinitum Serial Works, Wynn Kramarsky, New York (private showing)

Summersault, Gallery

Onetwentyeight, New York

2003

Notebook, Pinkard Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore

LeWitt Collection, New Britain Museum of American Art, CT

Rivington Beach, Gallery

Onetwentyeight, New York

Mother-in-Law, Gallery

Onetwentyeight, New York

2004

Infinite Possibilities: Serial Imagery in 20th Century Drawings, Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, MA

Works from the LeWitt Collection, Real Art Ways, Connecticut Cultural Center, Hartford, CT

Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Invitational, Artists Equity, Broome Street Gallery, New York

2005

Other Dimensions of Abstract Art, Tribes Gallery, New York

Group Show, Gallery

Onetwentyeight, New York

Annual Group Show, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Honolulu to New York, The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center, Honolulu

2006

Annual Show, Westbeth Gallery, New York

The 181st Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, National Academy Museum, School of Fine Arts, New York

Four (Drawings by Four Artists), Gallery Onetwentyeight, New York

10th Anniversary; Artists of Hawaii, First Hawaiian Center, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu

2007 Make Art Not War, Gallery Onetwentyeight, New York

Annual Show, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Asian American Artists: 1900–1970, Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles

LeWitt x 2, Sol LeWitt: Selections from the LeWitt Collection, Madison Museum of Contemporary Arts, WI; Miami Art Museum; The University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and Austin Museum of Art, TX

2008

Black & White: A Group Show, The Gallery at Sixth and Sixth, Tucson, AZ

Herbert Freedman Gallery, Interbonal, Inc., San Francisco

Asian/American/Modern Art, Shifting Currents, 1900–1970, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum; and Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY

2009

Holiday Invitational, Broome Street Gallery, New York

2010

Westbeth Pioneers, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Summer Set, David Findlay Jr. Fine Art, New York

2011

Summer Light, Westbeth Gallery, New York

Planet Alert, Gallery Onetwentyeight, New York

2012

Winter Group Show, Westbeth Gallery, New York

25 Years Anniversary Show, Gallery Onetwentyeight, New York

2014

Tetsuo Ochikubo and Friends, Koa Art Gallery, Honolulu

2017

Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West, Honolulu Museum of Art

2019

The Shaped Canvas Movement of the 1960s, D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc., New York

2021 Homage to the Square: Albers’s Influence on Geometric Abstraction, D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc., New York

2023

Of the Past and Present: Estates and Contemporary Artists at Hollis Taggart, Hollis Taggart, New York

Tracing Lineage: Abstraction and its Aftermath, The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT

2024

Dynamic Rhythm: Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s to the Present, Hollis Taggart, New York

Changes: Paintings from the 1970s, Hollis Taggart, New York

Asian-American Abstraction: Historic to Contemporary, Hollis Taggart, New York

Home of the Tigers: McKinley High and Modern Art, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii

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Howard Devree, “Art and Artists: Seven Exhibitions,” The New York Times, November 4, 1954, 46.

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Carlyle Burrows, “Art,” New York Herald-Tribune, October 1954.

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Howard Devree, “Whitney Round-Up: The Annual Appraisal Masters–Newcomers,” The New York Times, November 23, 1958, X13.

James R. Mellow, “Art Review: Display by 7 At Westbeth,” The New York Times, February 17, 1973, 28.

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Chris Jordan, “Linking East and West,” The Central New Jersey Home News, April 11, 1997, 8.

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Pomilio Mark, “The Elegance of Simplicity: The Paintings of Ralph Iwamoto” in Ralph Iwamoto: Fifty Years of Abstraction (Tucson, AZ: The Gallery at Sixth and Sixth, 2008).

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Representation,” The Art Newspaper, February 23, 2023, theartnewspaper. com/2023/02/27 /ralph-iwamoto-estate -represented-hollis-taggart.

“Art Industry News: A California Court Revives a Lawsuit Over a ‘Sexist’ Marilyn Monroe Statue and Other Stories,” Artnet, February 28, 2023, news. artnet.com/art-world/ art-industrynews-02-28 -2023-2262659.

“$55 M. Raised for Smithsonian Women’s History Museum, Photographer Ans Westra Dies at 86, and More: Morning Links for February 28, 2023,” ARTnews, February 28, 2023, artnews.com/art -news/news/smithsonian -womens-history-museum -fundraising-ans -westra-dead-morning -links-1234658946/.

“Estate of Japanese American Artist Ralph Iwamoto Now Represented by Hollis Taggart, NY,” Widewalls, March 2, 2023, widewalls.ch/news-feed /ralph-iwamoto-hollis -taggart-ny.

Michael Irwin, “Who Are Harmony Korine, Ralph Iwamoto, and John Wesley’s New Galleries?,” Ocula, March 2, 2023, ocula.com /magazine/art-news/ who-are-harmony-korine -ralph-iwamoto-new-galleries.

Frances Allitt, “Dealers News in Brief including a Show Focusing on an East Anglian Artist in Aldeburgh,” Antiques Trade Gazette, March 13, 2023, antiquestradegazette.com/print -edition/2023/march/2584/ dealers-diary/dealers-news -in-brief-including-a-show -focusing-on-an-east-anglian -artist-in-aldeburgh.

Arun Kakur, “The Art World News Roundup, March 2023,” Artsy, March 23, 2023, artsy.net/article/artsy -editorial-art-news-roundup -march-2023.

Lillian Tsang, “Art Historian Delves into Ralph Iwamoto’s Surrealist Paintings of Hawai’i Flora,” Hawai’i Public Radio, April 4, 2023, hawaiipublicradio.org/ the-conversation/2023-04 -04/art-historian-delves-into -ralph-iwamotos-surrealist -paintings-of-hawaii-flora.

Carlie Porterfield, “Chelsea Gallery Hollis Taggart Expanding Again Despite Fears of a slowing Market,” The Art Newspaper, August 10, 2023, theartnewspaper. com/2023/08/10/hollis -taggart-chelsea-gallery -expanding-new-york.

“An Origami-Inspired Art Wall Revives a Dreary London Transit Hub, and Other News,” Surface, August 18, 2023, surfacemag.com/ articles/adam-nathaniel -furman-abundance -paddington-london.

Arthur Stampleman, “Now

Showing at the Bruce,” The Rye Record, December 14, 2023, ryerecord.com/ now-showing-at-the-bruce-2.

Jeffrey Weschler, and Emily Chun. Asian-American Abstraction: Historic to Contemporary (New York: Hollis Taggart, 2024).

Adam Schradar, “The Honolulu School That Quietly Nurtured Hawaii’s Top Artists Gets a Museum Tribute,” Artnet, July 20, 2024, news.artnet.com/ art-world/mckinley-satoru -abe-honolulu-museum -shows-2513029.

Diane Seo, “Home of the Tigers: McKiney High School’s Artist Legacy,” Honolulu Magazine, September 1, 2024, honolulumagazine .com/homa-home-of-the -tigers-exhibition.

Robert Boyers, “Transcultural Dialogues,” Salmagundi (Fall/Winter 2024–25), salmagundi.skidmore.edu /articles/879-the-art -scene-transcultural -dialogues.

AWARDS & GRANTS

1957

Purchase Prize, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

1958

John Hay Whitney Foundation, Fellowship, New York

1987

Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Grant, New York

2002

Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Grant, New York

2011

Congressional Gold Medal Award, Washington, D.C.

SELECTED PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

Bjorn Reselle Fine Art, New York

Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

Franklin Furnace Archives, New York

Herbert Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Honolulu Advertiser

Publication Collection, Honolulu

Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i, Heritage Room, Honolulu

Werner (Wynn) Kramarsky Collection, New York

Sol LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe

James and Mimi Rosenquist, Aripeka, Tampa, FL

Robert Ryman, New York

Sheldon Swope Art Gallery, Terre Haute, IN

St. Mary’s College, St. Mary’s City, MD

State Foundation of Culture and the Arts, Honolulu

Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Charmion Von Weigand Collection, New York

The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu

Thurston Twigg-Smith Collection, Honolulu

University of Arizona, Department of Fine Arts, Tucson

Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA

Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition “Ralph Iwamoto: Octagonal Permutations” organized by Hollis Taggart, New York, and presented from June 5–July 18, 2025.

Reproduction of contents prohibited.

Hollis Taggart

521 West 26th Street 1st & 2nd Floors

New York, NY 10001

Tel 212 628 4000 www.hollistaggart.com

Catalogue production: Kara Spellman

Copyediting: Jessie Sentivan

Design: McCall Associates, New York

Photography: Joshua Nefsky, New York

Front cover: Abingdon Square, 1973 (pl. 4)

Frontispiece: Iwamoto in his studio, 1976, photo by Dave Kohler

Back cover: Iwamoto in his studio, 1976, photo by Dave Kohler

Frontispiece, page 11: © Dave Kohler; Page 6: © Steve Wada; Page 8 (left): © 2025 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Page 8 (right): Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY; Page 36: © Masao Katagami

Ralph Iwamoto: Octagonal Permutations

RALPH IWAMOTO

RALPH IWAMOTO

OCTAGONAL PERMUTATIONS

FOREWORD

RALPH IWAMOTO’S

OCTAGONS,

OR “HOW ONLY A FORMULARIZED ART CAN BE FORMULALESS”

EMILY CHUN

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

AWARDS & GRANTS

SELECTED PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS