2021 Catalogue Archive

Like many conceptual artists of the 1970s, Masafumi Maita used photography and a systematic approach to art-making to ask questions about an increasingly image- and information-saturated world. He crafted a range of works that dealt with presence/absence, the landscape, and the mutability of images. Maita used photographs from a variety of sources and combined them with other art media, seen here in this postcard collage from 1977 where he layers a horizon/directional line over a horizontal bridge in an uninhabited landscape. The postcard was perhaps an apt choice for Maita, since it is both a photograph and a landscape that can traverse the globe. Maita’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Venice Biennales of 1976 and 1986, and he has work in numerous public collections, among them The Utsukusi-ga-hara Open-Air Museum, Nagano; Open-Air Museum of Sculpture, Ube; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.