MEDIA RELEASE 06.04. 26.05.2019 Keiichi Tanaami In cooperation with Fumetto Comic Festival Lucerne “A magazine that is packed to the brim with human interests and desires bears a strong resemblance to who I am as a person. My life is not a straight shot, with one central theme running through it like a book. It would be more properly called a ‘magazine editor’s life’, spent looking about at my surroundings constantly, wandering from place to place, engaging in a wide variety of work along the way.” This is the way Keiichi Tanaami (*1936) aptly describes himself, pointing out something that is important for his work: a flood of images and impressions, be they from memory or from dreams and hallucinations, on the one hand, and on the other, the principle of montage and collage. The kaleidoscopically simmering works of the Japanese artist interlink the American comic world, psychedelic nightmares and Japanese culture. The colourful compositions create a cosmos of their own and tell about war and disease in a surprisingly concrete way. As a child during the Second World War the artist experienced the US air attacks on Tokyo and these became important motifs in his art: roaring American bombers, Japanese searchlights, his grandfather’s deformed goldfish. In its very title, the animated video The Laughing Spider (2016) cites the graphic work of the same name by the French artist Odilon Redon, which inspired Keiichi Tanaami’s anthropomor- phic spider-creature. While cherry blossoms and the Fujiyama volcano still suggest an idyll in the aesthetic of Japanese woodcuts, an UFO whizzes through space, catapulting the audience into a technoid world. Vaginas and penises repeatedly wander through the image, while babies fall from heaven like bombs. Keiichi Tanaami masterfully combines eastern and western picto- rial worlds and blends citations from pop and high culture: Roy Lichtenstein’s comic pictures appear, as does a reference to Edvard Munch’s Scream Keiichi Tanaami attended the Design Academy at Musashino Art University. While still a stu- dent, he received awards for his unconventional designs and also commissions for advertising. Meantime Keiichi Tanaami is regarded as a forerunner of Japanese Pop Art and is one of the country’s most influential artists. Meanwhile, Keiichi Tanaami is looked upon as the forerunner of Japanese Pop Art and is one of the country’s most influential artists. His career began in the 1960s in the field of tension, typical of the time, between commissioned art and the anti-art movement, experiments with drugs and consumer culture. Under the influence of the Japanese cardboard-theatre “Kamishibai”, American B-movies, Mangas and the high-gloss advertising world, he developed a style very much his own. Of particular importance was his encounter with Andy Warhol, whom he visited in his Factory. In him he found a concrete model for the combination of commissioned graphic art and free art. Fumetto is presenting the first institutional solo exhibition of work by Keiichi Tanaamis in Switzerland. It brings together works dating from 1968 to 2018 and reflecting his whole multifaceted oeuvre: collages, graphic art, paintings, drawings, animation and sculptures. kuratiert von Jana Jakoubek TERMINE Opening Saturday, 06.04., 11 am Welcome and introduction Fanni Fetzer, directorin Kunstmuseum Luzern Jana Jakoubek, artistic director Fumetto Comic Festival Luzern followed by drinks Artist Talk Saturday, 06.04., 12.30 am Lars von Törne, editorial journalist Tagesspiegel Berlin, talks with the artist Keiichi Tanaami and the gallerist Shinji Nanzuka Translation (Japanese / English): Mizuki Mazbara presented by Fumetto Comic Festival Lucerne and Edition Patrick Frey .