Falling Inflections

Falling Inflections 

フォーリング・インフレクションズ

Artist
ARAKAWA, Shusaku
荒川 修作
Birth Year
1936
Death Year
2010
Date
1978 
Technique, Material, Format
acrylic on canvas 
Dimension
168.0 x 254.0 cm 
Category
Oil or Other Painting by Japanese Artist 
Inventory Number
87-OJ-001 

At the end of the 1950s, there was a movement in Japan that sought to destroy existing art forms and replace them with new types of expression. After participating in this movement, which was known as Anti-Art, Arakawa Shusaku relocated permanently to New York, in late 1961. From around 1964, he began making arrangements of symbols such as dots, lines, and arrows with corresponding words, creating “diagram paintings” formed through association with the meanings of particular imagery and language.
In this painting, English words relating to optics, such as “POINT BLANK,” “DISTANCE OF FOCUS,” “MODULATING,” and “DISTANCE” are written over a monochrome semicircle that contains a gradation from black to white. The work’s title, which suggests the bending or refraction of light, serves to connect the words with the shapes depicted, and perhaps also poses a kind of poetic riddle about the meaning of the act of seeing.
(KASHIWAGI Tomoh)

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