Masatoshi Izumi

Kegarenaki mizu Tsukubai (water basin)

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Previously exhibited at Basel 2021.

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Description/

Born into a family of stone carvers in the town of Mure on the Japanese island of Shikoku, Masatoshi Izumi was the principal collaborator of Isamu Noguchi on the artist’s late stone sculpture. Izumi began working with stone in 1953, and in 1964 he co-founded the Stone Atelier in Kagawa Prefecture, dedicated to new architectural and artistic uses of traditional stone cutting techniques. That year he also met Isamu Noguchi, who in 1966 asked Izumi to help him carve the monumental granite sculpture Black Sun, completed in 1969 for the Seattle Art Museum. Izumi then developed a studio complex in Mure for Isamu Noguchi, and he assembled a group of artisans to work on Noguchi’s granite and basalt sculptures. In addition to his two decade collaboration with Isamu Noguchi, Masatoshi Izumi and his colleagues have realized some of the most ambitious architectural, sculpture, and garden stone projects.

Japanese basalt.

Masatoshi Izumi

designer

Izumi Masatoshi was born in 1938 and was primarily influenced by the 1950s growing up. The 1950s can be said to have been dominated by Abstract Expressionism, a form of painting that prioritised expressive brushstrokes and explored ideas about organic nature, spirituality and the sublime. Much of the focus was on the formal properties of painting, and ideas of action painting were unified with the political freedom of the United States society as opposed to the strictures nature of the Soviet bloc. Important artists of the Abstract Expressionist Generation included Jackson Pollock (who innovated his famed drip, splatter and pour painting techniques), Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Frank Kline, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Adolph Gottlieb. It was a male dominated environment, but necessary reassessment of this period has underlined the contributions of female artists such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Bourgeois, amongst others.