Paul Horiuchi art exhibition

PAUL HORIUCHI: EAST AND WEST

at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington
THROUGH JUNE 15, 2008

Barbara Johns has selected over 60 works for this major retrospective of the late master artist Paul Horiuchi. Included are early watercolors, sculptures, collage paintings and multi-panel screens. Art work dates from the 1920s through the mid-1990s and is borrowed from prominent private, corporate, and public collections.

The book, Paul Horiuchi: East and West, authored by Barbara Johns, has been released in conjunction with this exhibition. This 128-page book, published by the University of Washington Press in partnership with the Museum of Northwest Art, is designed by Phil Kovacevich. Enriched with over 120 images, it includes documentary photographs and works of art.

for more info: www.museumofnwart.org

Curator's Statement:

Paul Horiuchi's collages are celebrated for their vibrant colors and potent blacks, their joyful exuberance and subtle serenity, and their monumental power and poetic whisper. Horiuchi painted rice and mulberry papers in rainbow colors and the saturated blacks of sumi, then tore them into shapes to reveal their edges and fibers. Like the firing of ceramics, the tearing of papers invited nature into the making of art. Arranged on canvas or board, the compositions carry wide-ranging expressive capacity, evoking the rawness and rocky uplift of the Northwest landscape, the cultivated quietude of formal gardens, or the decorative elegance of Japanese textiles.

Horiuchi began working with collage in the mid-1950s and by the end of the decade achieved his signature style. With the support of Seattle gallerist Zoe Dusanne, his work quickly won national and international recognition. It partook fully of mid-century American abstraction, while it also drew upon the artist's Japanese heritage in its evocation of mood, reverence for nature, and material sensibility. His work was seen as bridging the two aesthetic and philosophical perspectives, and it supported the opinion that much of the outstanding contemporary art in Seattle, his home, was distinguished by Asian influence.

Horiuchi (1906-1999) was born in Japan and at age fourteen immigrated to the United States, where he found work with the Union Pacific Railroad in Wyoming. For two decades he lived in Wyoming, working the railroad by day and painting in any spare time, until the traumatic dislocations of World War II cost him his home and job. At the end of the war he and his family settled in Seattle, where his art came to full fruition. Having begun painting in the western tradition, he credited his artist-friend Mark Tobey with encouraging him to turn to his Japanese heritage. Throughout his work, Horiuchi sought inspiration in nature and continually found renewal in its spirit and forms.

Barbara Johns, Guest Curator