2023 Catalogue Archive

As an early leader in the Mono-ha (“School of Things”) group active in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Katsuro Yoshida helped redefine the trajectory of Japanese art. Like many of his colleagues, Yoshida’s sculptures consisted of careful arrangements of natural and industrial materials, juxtaposed to highlight an active relationship and a dynamic understanding of space. Created in the later years of his life, the Touch series of paintings and works on paper went against Yoshida’s more controlled early sculptures and prints that showed no evidence of the artist’s hand. Works in this series were made as the artist applied the material directly to the surface with his fingers. Many of these works feature hovering, biomorphic forms whose soft curved shape is enhanced by Yoshida’s unique paint application, seen here in a deeply intuitive work titled Touch “In the Green.” Yoshida was included in many important exhibitions of the late 60s/early 70s, including The 8th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (1968); Trends in Contemporary Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (1969); and August 1970: Aspects of New Japanese Art, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1970). In 2012 his work was included in the exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha.