Now Representing Keiichi Tanaami

(New York, NY) – Venus Over Manhattan is pleased to announce its representation of Tokyo-based artist Keiichi Tanaami in collaboration with NANZUKA, Tokyo. This news comes during the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the artist, Keiichi Tanaami: Manhattan Universe, on view at 55 Great Jones Street through October 8, 2022.

Rising to prominence in the 1960s, Keiichi Tanaami (b. 1936, Tokyo) found early success early by creating images now deeply forged in the cultural landscape of both Japan and the United States. He is widely considered the progenitor of the Superflat movement, embodied today by Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, among others. Tanaami’s work first registered the influence of manga and the Neo-Dada movement in Japan, mingling with his childhood experience of the Second World War, a recurring motif via images of air raids, flares, and blasts of white light from the detonation of explosives. His paintings also reflect memories of kamishibai—public theater productions for Japanese children—that beguiled his mind and eye as a child.

Tanaami’s artistic practice is likewise characterized by an intensive cross-pollination between modes of production—drawing, painting, collage, graphic illustration, film, and sculpture. In his large-scale works, American pop iconography is placed into complex conversation with historic forms of Japanese illustration, such as traditional ukiyo-e wood- block printing. Through these techniques, familiar American-born icons—Betty Boop, Western cowboys, and Superman, among others—are transformed into characters in the surreal and enveloping landscapes of the artist’s imagination. It is Tanaami’s fascination with American pop iconography and its collision with traditional Japanese imagery that explores the tension between disparate forces, such as the East and the West, violence and innocence, and commercial imagery and high art.