Robert W. Mallary - Neo-Dada Art

Robert W. Mallary (Dec. 2, 1917-Feb. 10, 1997) was an American sculptor and pioneer in computer art. He was renowned for his Neo-Dada or "junk art" sculpture in the 1950s and '60s, created from found materials and urban detritus, using liquid plastics and resins. In 1968 he created one of the world's first computer-generated sculptures.Mallary was born in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He was interested in art from his youth, and went to Mexico City to study at the Escuela de Las Artes Del Libro (now the Escuela Nacional de Artes Gráficas) in 1938-39, and then at the Academy of San Carlos in 1942-43, where he was inspired by José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He also studied at the Painter's Workshop School in Boston, Massachusetts in 1941.He worked as an advertising Art Director in California from 1945-48, and as a freelance commercial artist until 1954, as he continued to pursue his fine arts career. Mallary's paintings (made with liquid polyester) were shown at the Urban Gallery in New York City in 1954, where he had four other exhibits until 1959. He also exhibited at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco (1953) and the Santa Fe Museum in Arizona (1958).Mallary arranged found objects — discarded cardboard or fabrics — which he covered with polyester resin to create abstract relief sculptures and assemblages. He also produced works using sand and straw hardened with polyester resin. A prominent example of Mallary's "junk art" style was his monumental "Cliffhangers" sculpture, exhibited outside the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing, NY. Other pieces of Mallary's work were included in the "Sculpture U.S.A." and "Sixteen Americans" exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1959, and then at its "Art of Assemblage" exhibition in 1961. He was selected for a $1,000 preliminary award in the U.S. National section of the Guggenheim International Award in 1960, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. Wikipedia

 

Genpei Akasegawa - Japanese Avant-garde art

Genpei Akasegawa  was a pseudonym of Japanese artist Katsuhiko Akasegawa  (March 27, 1937 – October 26, 2014).He used another pen name, Katsuhiko Otsuji , for literary works. In January 1963, Akasegawa sent out invitations to a solo exhibition at a gallery in Tokyo. The announcement was delivered to several close friends in a cash envelope sent through the postal service. The announcement itself was a 1,000-yen note reproduced in monochromatic colors on the front, with relevant information regarding the exhibit on the back. He produced four more during the next year.Akasegawa was born in 1937 in Yokohama, and moved to Ashiya, Ōita and Nagoya in his childhood because of his father's job. Shusaku Arakawa was a high school classmate in Nagoya.In 1960, Akasegawa became involved within the Neo-Dada Organizers, along with Ushio Shinohara, Shusaku Arakawa, and Masanobu Yoshimura. He formed the Hi-Red Center with Jiro Takamatsu and Natsuyuki Nakanishi in 1963, which was a group of artists that presented their works as a collective in Japan; they performed happenings within the Hi-Red Center. Akasegawa was also associated with the avant-garde.In the 1970s he used the idea of Hyper-Art (chōgeijutsu), an ordinary but useless street object that happened to look like a conceptual artwork despite nobody having intended this. He called such things Hyperart Thomasson (named for Yomiuri Giants outfielder Gary Thomasson) and published photographs of them first within the magazine Shashin Jidai and later within books.In January 1964, his 1,000-yen note partial reproductions became noticed by the police and he was indicted for creating imitations of banknotes, in violation of the 1894 Law Controlling the Imitation of Currency and Securities. The language of the law was quite vague, prohibiting any manufacture or sale of objects with an exterior front that may “be confused for currency or securities”. In August 1966, he went on trial for what was dubbed the "Thousand-Yen Bill Incident". In June 1967, he was found guilty with a three-month suspended sentence. He appealed twice. The decision was upheld in 1970.Wikipedia

Neo-Dada -Tetsumi Kudo

Tetsumi Kudo (23 February 1935 – 12 November 1990), was a Japanese artist associated with the Neo-Dada traditionTetsumi Kudo was born in 1935 in Osaka, Japan and graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 1958. In 1957, he began exhibiting his work at the Salon of Independents, Yomiuri and had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Blanche, Tokyo. He was awarded the Grand Prize and a travel grant to Paris through his participation in the 1962 Second International Young Artists Exhibition in Tokyo. His work made international appearances at the Venice Bienniale (1976), and the Biennial São Paulo (1977, awarded a special mention) while also appearing frequently in museums and galleries throughout Japan and France, with a growing recognition in the Netherlands. Notable museum solo exhibitions include the National Museum of Art, Osaka (1994), a joint-exhibition and catalogue organized by the Van Reekum Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1991), as well as the Hirosaki City Museum, Aomori (1986). In the year before his death, Galerie du Génie and FIAC dedicated a retrospective and catalogue to Kudo’s work. His work was most recently in a solo exhibition organized by La Maison Rouge and the Fondation Antoine de Galbert in Paris, accompanied by a catalogue written by Anne Tronche. His work can also be found in the collections of the Musée Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka. Kudo’s work made a rare appearance to US audiences in the Guggenheim’s 1994 exhibition, “Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky,” and again in 1998 with its inclusion in a group exhibition at the MOCA LA “Out of Action: Between performance and the Object, 1949-1979.”Wikipedia