Minoru Onoda, Circle Master from Japan's Gutai Group

Minoru Onoda, Work 64-W, 1964; oil, gofun andglue on plywood; 36 1/8 x 36 1/8 x 1 3/4 inches(photo © Estate of Minoru Onoda, courtesy ofAnne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie)

BASEL,Switzerland —Beyond the orgy ofart-world hypesurrounding theannual Art Baselfair, the galleryscene here in itshost city and itsenvirons is asvaried as it iscompact; operatingin the shadow ofthe venerable

Kunstmuseum Basel, the repository of some of Europe’sfinest modern and medieval art collections, including the

WEEKEND

Minoru Onoda, Circle

Master from Japan’s Gutai

Group

Onoda daydreamed about the power of his dots and circles to poke adefiant thumb in the eye of “the world we are now living in.”

Edward M. Gómez June 17, 2017

Minoru Onoda, Circle Master from Japan's Gutai Group https://hyperallergic.com/385411/minoru-onoda-maru-anne-moss...

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The Japanese artist Minoru Onoda (1937-2008),a member of the avant-garde Gutai ArtAssociation, making a kite in 1988 (photo byPaul Eubel-Plag, © Estate of Minoru Onoda,courtesy of Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie)

vast holdings of drawings, watercolors, and prints in itsKupferstichkabinett division, these local galleries knowhow to put on a good show, especially when thehigh-profile Art Basel fair rolls into town.

Just a few blocks from the Kunstmuseum, for example,Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie is presenting Maru (“Circle”in English), an exhibition of paintings by Minoru Onoda,a member of Japan’s post-World War II, avant-garde Gutaigroup. As I noted in a recent Hyperallergic Weekend articleabout Onoda’s Gutai confrère, Toshio Yoshida, the GutaiArt Association, as their collective was officially known,was founded in 1954 by the businessman-turned-painterJirō Yoshihara and more than a dozen younger art-makersfrom Osaka and Kobe.

In recent decades,such Gutai artistsas Atsuko Tanaka(1932–2005),Kazuo Shiraga(1924–2008) andSadamasaMotonaga(1924–2008),among others, haveearned criticalrecognition apartfrom theirinfluentialassociation’scollective label.Now, with dealerAnne Mosseri-Marlio’s Baselpresentation, it’s

Onoda’s turn in the spotlight. On view through July 14,Maru is the first-ever solo showing outside Japan of worksby this artist, who was born in Japanese-occupied


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Close-ups of artist Minoru Onoda’s paintingsfrom the early 1960s showing their undulating,textured surfaces made with gofun, a Japanese,moldable paste (photo by the author forHyperallergic)

Manchuria, China, in 1937 and died in Japan in 2008.

At its core is a selection of paintings Onoda producedduring the first half of the 1960s, before he became aGutai member. In them, he worked out what wouldbecome the fundamentals of his signature formalvocabulary. Organized by Mosseri-Marlio in conjunctionwith the painter’s son, Isa Onoda, an artist and art teacherbased in southern Japan, this concise survey includes afew pieces from later decades, too.

One of the Gutai artists’ motivating principles was tohonor — and, in effect, to reveal — the inherentexpressive properties of their materials without trying tocunningly manipulate them. So was their determinationto create works of radical originality: Tanaka made a“dress” of colored electric light tubes; Shōzō Shimamotomade “paintings” of newspaper sheets stretched onframes and punched through with holes; Shiraga paintedwith his feet; and Motonaga explored the accidentalbeauty of big, drippy, majestic blobs in color-saturatedpictures.

Onoda, whosefather had workedas a policeman inJapanese-controlledManchuria, wasstill a boy when hisfamily moved backto Japan beforeWorld War IIended, settling inHimeji, to the west

of Kōbe. He went on to study art in Osaka (later he wouldsay he enjoyed reading van Gogh’s biography and letters);by the mid-1950s, having assimilated Western modernisttechniques, Onoda was producing paintings of traditionalJapanese houses and other buildings, but toward the end


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Minoru Onoda, Work 61-14, 1961; mixed mediaon plywood; 36.14 x 52.36 inches (photo ©Estate of Minoru Onoda, courtesy of AnneMosseri-Marlio Galerie)

of the decade he began making stylized images offlattened, rectangular human figures.

Like the other Gutai artists, he became aware ofpost-WWII European, art informel forms of abstractpainting but eventually dismissed them as merelyresembling walls. Yet his own works, which he activelyexhibited in group shows, became more abstractthemselves, incorporating thinly cut, circular slices ofPVC pipe laid flat against their surfaces and slatheredwith paint to produce rich textures.

In 1961, aHimeji-based artmagazinepublished a textOnoda authoredabout what hedubbed“propagationpainting.” In it, heobserved that artinformel, whose

influence had been felt in Japan for several years, hadbecome so “safe” and “accepted” that it had “los[t] itsinitial drive for negation and rebellion.” Citing his ownefforts to “make a cynical critique,” and what he called his“obsession” with the notion of the mechanicalduplication of just about anything, Onoda ditched hissculptural PVC circles and began painting endless maru— circular dots — in sprawling, eddying, seeminglyrandom patterns of essentially primary colors, withstreams of smaller and larger colored dots flowing intoreal gullies and broad valleys on the surfaces of hispictures.

That’s because Onoda used glue and traditional Japanesegofun, a moldable paste made from pulverized oyster andclam shells, to produce bas-relief mounds on their gentlyundulating, thick plywood surfaces; this kind of


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Minoru Onoda, Work 63-12 and Work 63-13,both dated 1963; oil, gofun and glue onplywood; each piece 40 x 10 1/8 inches (photo ©Estate of Minoru Onoda, courtesy of AnneMosseri-Marlio Galerie)

experiment in oil-painting technique is exemplified insuch pieces on view as “Work 63-12” and “Work 63-13”(both 1963), which are narrow and vertical in format, and“Work 64-W” (1964), a large, hippy-trippy, psychedelicsquare. They’re colorful, dynamic, peculiar — andhypnotizing.

(It’s tempting tocompare Onoda’sdot-makingobsession with thatof anotherJapanesemodernist, YayoiKusama, whofamously painteddots on the nakedbodies ofparticipants in herNew Yorkhappenings of thelate 1960s, but herevolving use of themotif could bevariouslyspectacular,

mysterious, or elegantly decorative. In interviews and inher writings, Kusama has explained that her obsessive-repetitive use of certain motifs was motivated more byparticular psychological-emotional impulses than by thekinds of formal, aesthetic, or intellectual concerns Onodaexpressed in relation to his art.)

It was Motonaga who brought Onoda into the Gutai ArtAssociation in 1965. That year, Onoda showed his work inthe collective’s 16th group exhibition, which took place inTokyo; he would continue to take part in every regular,similar presentation until the association disbanded in1972, following the death of its leader, Yoshihara.


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Minoru Onoda, Work 70-G2, 1970; oil, gofunand glue on plywood; 27 1/8 x 23 5/8 x 3 1/2inches (photo © Estate of Minoru Onoda,courtesy of Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie)

By that time, Onoda’s art had evolved in many ways. In1970, for example, artists associated with Gutai producedan array of action-based performances and multi-mediaworks for the world’s fair, Expo ’70, which took place inOsaka; Onoda’s mixed-media contributions attempted tohumanize that era’s emerging technologies through theuse of sound sensors, moving walls, and interactivefeatures.

In the currentBasel show, suchpristine, precise,geometricabstractions as“Work 70-G2”(1970; oil, gofunand glue onplywood) and“Work 75-Blue 9”(1975; acrylic onplywood), featurebig, finely renderedgroups of

concentric circles (some of which are made up ofcountless dots, of course); here the artist can be seenpushing his ideas forward technically and formally,bringing his visual language in line with the harder-edged,tech-romancing, design-flavored aesthetic thatcharacterized a lot of 1970s art, for better or worse.

“Watashi-no maru (‘my circles’) will extend out of thepicture, not only to the wall and ceiling, but to the roadand the car,” Onoda once wrote, daydreaming about thepower of his favorite, inexhaustible art-making motif. Hisdot- or circle-filled “propagation paintings,” he believed,would somehow poke a defiant thumb in the eye of “theworld we are now living in.”

“Looking up at the sky vacantly,” he also observed, “Idream that this sky and the world will be filled completely


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Isa Onoda and art dealer Anne Mosseri-Marlioat Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie in Basel,Switzerland, examining photo sheets showingworks from the different phases of artistMinoru Onoda’s career (photo by the author forHyperallergic)

with watashi-no maru.” He compared the proliferation ofhis key motif of the 1960s to microorganisms anddeclared, “My wish is that these bacteria will spread allover the world.”

As it turned out,before that rash ofcircle-dots couldbreak out in anall-envelopinginundation,Onoda’s artevolved throughseveral distinctphases. In Basel,his son Isa showedme photos of hisfather’s latered-on-black,blue-on-black, andblack-on-blackpainted-plywood-on-painted-plywood paintings,

in which loosely rectangular forms with perforated edgeslie like flattened sheets of pie dough against pitch-blackgrounds.

As the evidence of such works makes clear, ultimately,Onoda’s aesthetic gears shifted with the passage of time,as his creative focus moved from dizzying oceans ofcolored dots to quiet, sober essays in pure form (one ofwhich, “Work 84-12-I,” 1984, is on view in Basel). In thevery last series of paintings he produced, between 1994and 2008, big, dense, semi-transparent patches of blackand blue, layered on top of each other with broadbrushstrokes, seem to float above white backgrounds;they function more as symbols of tightly concentratedenergy than of ominous foreboding.


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Minoru Onoda, Work 75-Blue-9, 1975; acrylic onplywood; 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 1 3/8 inches (photo ©Estate of Minoru Onoda, courtesy of AnneMosseri-Marlio Galerie)

At the gallery, Isa Onoda told me, “Looking back over thespan of my father’s art-making experience, from onecreative phase to the next, he seemed to stay true toGutai’s spirit of innovation and deep engagement with hismaterials. There is something new to be found in theworks of each phase.”

For now, thisilluminatingexhibition, whichcalls attention toyet another strong,personal, creativevision that helpedshape Gutai’scollective ethos, iswell worth a detourfrom the frenzy ofBasel’s big fair.

Minoru Onada’sMaru continues at

Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie (Malzgasse 20, CH-4052 Basel,Switzerland) through July 14.


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Minoru Onoda, Circle Master from Japan's Gutai Group