Ikeda is part of a generation of artists emerging in the early 1950s who were emboldened to take back Japanese culture from the militarists, reclaim their own individuality after two decades of nationalistic brainwashing, and find new ways of expression. […] Ikeda, On Kawara, and Hiroshi Nakamura, among others, resolutely engaged with society, politics, and economics in their work.
Outrage at U.S. thermonuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in 1954 provoked Ikeda to begin to mutate his representations of human and animal life. This change also reflected the toxic outcome of Japan’s rapid reindustrialization. Ikeda’s figures became embryonic and swollen, occupying a barren post-nuclear landscape where chemical pipes and human intestines fuse into menacing urban landscapes that are haunted by disfigured dogs and birds. In this spirit, Ikeda undertook his great series Genealogy of Monsters, An Album of Birds and Beasts, and One Hundred Masks between 1955 and 1960.
The failure of protests to prevent the signing of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, in 1960, brought about a change in Ikeda’s work. Social concerns momentarily lapsed as he explored the structure of the body and human consciousness at a molecular level in his Elliptical Space series (1963–64). His subsequent Toy World series (1966–70) inventively fuses Ikeda’s ongoing social concerns with Hans Bellmer–like Surrealistic references, Japanese pop culture, and psychedelia.
Ikeda’s works were included in Tatsuo Ikeda: An Elliptical Visionary at Nerima Art Museum; Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ikeda Tatsuo: The Trajectory of Postwar Avant-garde Art at the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art; and Ikeda Tatsuo and Nakamura Hiroshi at the Nerima Art Museum, Tokyo. He was also featured in the documentary film ANPO: Art X War (2010), directed by Linda Hoaglund, which examines the relationship between the Japan-U.S. security treaty, war, and art. Ikeda participated in the 2022 Venice Biennale, as well as the much lauded group exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern.
[excerpted from Fergus McCaffrey website: www.fergusmccaffrey.com]
