Laplace Expansion Expansion

Laplace Expansion 

ラプラース展開

Artist
MURAKAMI, Yoshio
村上 善男
Birth Year
1933
Death Year
2006
Date
1959 
Technique, Material, Format
oil on canvas 
Dimension
183.0 x 220.0 cm 
Category
Oil or Other Painting by Japanese Artist 
Inventory Number
89-OJ-005 

Countless red, rake-like shapes representing human hands seem to be desperately struggling to break through the sharp lines stretched across the painting. In 1955, Murakami Yoshio had made a painting about the protests against the opening of a U.S. artillery test range in Ishikawa Prefecture. In that work, he had used red hands tearing at barbed wire to express the people’s anger, and that had given birth to his Ayatori (cat’s cradle) Series, with red hands and black lines. The title of this work, Laplace Expansion, refers to cofactor expansion in mathematics (a method of calculating a determinant of 4 × 4 or more), which was developed by the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. While the work seems to be intended as social commentary, it also conveys a sense of something more abstract.
(KATADA Yuko)

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