WKM Gallery is pleased to announce In Pursuit of Totality: Paintings from 1950 to 1998, a retrospective exhibition showcasing key works by Japanese painter Yamada Masaaki (1929 - 2010) from Shane Akeroyd. This exhibition brings together paintings from Yamada’s three major series, Still Life, Work, and Color, tracing his evolution from contemplative still life paintings to rhythmic abstractions and, finally, to meditative color fields. Yamada’s practice is increasingly being recognized as a vital contribution to the discourse on post-war Japanese abstraction, and In Pursuit of Totality: Paintings from 1950 to 1998 offers a timely opportunity to reassess the work of a historically underacknowledged artist whose sustained formal inquiry pioneered advances in the language of modernism.

Spanning several decades of production in Tokyo following World War II, Yamada’s work is marked by a singular visual language grounded in line, color, and repetition. Yamada was deeply impacted by his experiences during the war, including three firebombing raids and the destruction of his home in Tokyo, and his practice can be understood as a sustained, lifelong attempt at grappling with the residual psychological scars of those years. His early Still Life series reflects a quiet contemplation on the ephemerality of life in the vein of vanitas, often featuring objects imbued with themes of transience or death. The flowers, fruits, vases, and various domestic objects that make up his still life paintings were largely rendered from memory, as if they were vessels for loss and longing. As the series progressed, the recognizable subjects of his paintings dissolved into increasingly deconstructed shapes that recurred across canvases, not as depictions of specific items or scenes, but as a distillation of their essence. As the boundaries between object and space collapsed further, Yamada’s foray into abstraction deepened, gradually giving way to rhythmic compositions.

This evolution into pure abstraction in the 1950s marked the beginning of his acclaimed Work series, which he continued creating for over four decades. It was during this era that he eventually arrived at the minimalist stripes and grids, rendered in a limited palette of mostly earthy tones, that gained him international recognition and have become some of his most representative work. This was followed by the Color series of the 1990s, the final culmination of the artist’s spiritual and intellectual exploration of “the equivalence of colors” and the pursuit of “totality.” These impressive yet enigmatic phrases seem to hint at a journey towards transcendence, one that found its visual representation in subtle, meditative canvases of layered color fields. The calming and subtle nature of these later works, characterized by monochromatic hues and stable repetition, stand in stark contrast to themes of violence and disorder. In this way, his works can be understood as efforts to process and ultimately reject the senseless cruelty of war, reflecting a search for peace, coherence, and connection to a greater sense of harmony and order.

The manifestation of this inner dialogue in Yamada’s work resonates with, and in some ways foreshadows, the formal developments of abstraction and minimalism that were simultaneously gaining momentum across the sea in the United States. Art historian Matthew Larking notes that Yamada’s practice “initially rehearsed 20th-century Western modernism's major moments, subsequently caught up with its achievements and then anticipated some later developments. His entire career is almost illustrative of the mid-20th-century American art critic Clement Greenberg's theorizing of modernist painting's progress toward withdrawing from content and celebrating the medium's paint and inherent two-dimensionality.”(1) In this sense, Yamada was both deeply rooted in the Japanese context and aligned with broader transformations in painting, positioning him as a figure deserving of deeper critical investigation.

Although Yamada received growing recognition in Japan and abroad from the 1960s and onwards, the artist worked in relative solitude during his lifetime, making information about his career and practice scarce. His work has undergone renewed critical and institutional attention in recent years following his death. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to revisit Yamada’s contributions to post-war art, and to reflect on his unwavering commitment to abstraction as a personal and philosophical response to the chaos of the 20th century. Organized with the generous support of Shane Akeroyd, In Pursuit of Totality: Paintings from 1950 to 1998 affirms Yamada’s position as a vital figure in the history of Japanese modernism.

1. Larking, Matthew. “Masaaki Yamada: Painter of Stripes and Colors.” The Japan Times, March 14, 2017. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/03/14/arts/masaaki-yamada-painter-stripes-colors