Philly Adams, Senior Director of Saatchi Gallery has launched a new venture which will work in collaboration with galleries and artist’s estates, in selling exhibitions. Lévy Gorvy will inaugurate SALON with an exhibition by Tsuyoshi Maekawa, opening on 24 February 2017. The presentation will include a selection of paintings by the artist from the 1950s and ’60s, with important loans from Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, conveying both the unique sensibility and remarkable energy of Gutai’s most productive period.
SALON has been created because there are limited opportunities for international artists to show at major museums in the UK
Says Adams: ‘SALON has been created because there are limited opportunities for international artists to show at major museums in the UK. Saatchi Gallery, which attracts more than 1.5 million visitors a year, will provide that platform, and SALON in collaboration with Lévy Gorvy is privileged to inaugurate with a breathtaking display of historic works by Tsuyoshi Maekawa.’
Dominique Lévy previously held an exhibition of Maekawa’s works in New York in 2014. Tsuyoshi Maekawa will be held concurrently with an exhibition of fellow Gutai painter Kazuo Shiraga’s works at Lévy Gorvy’s Old Bond Street location. By presenting simultaneous exhibitions by two Gutai masters across both venues in London, the galleries will highlight the legacy of this influential avant-garde collective.
Tsuyoshi Maekawa (b. 1936) was a member of the Gutai Art Association, Japan’s most significant avant-garde collective of the postwar era founded in 1954. He was included in the 8th Gutai Exhibition at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in 1959, and became a protégé of the group’s founder, Jiro Yoshihara. The first solo exhibition of Maekawa’s work was held at the Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka in November 1963. From that point until the group’s eventual dissolution following Yoshihara’s death in 1972, Maekawa was represented in every Gutai event.