PRESS RELEASE

EXHIBITIONS:

May 30 - June 30, 2001
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 7 from 5:30-7:30 pm

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY is pleased to announce the exhibition of unpublished photographs by Japanese photographer, MASAHISA FUKASE.

The negatives from which this current body of work was produced were recently discovered at a country home where Masahisa Fukase spent time away from the pressures of Tokyo. These eclectic images, never exhibited before, represent a playfulness rarely found in this artist's work.

Masahisa Fukase is considered to be both a legend and an enigma in his native Japan. For a culture that is traditionally reluctant to expose emotion in public, the expressionistic character of Fukase's work was, in part, the result of the development of the generation that evolved after WWII.

Fukase was born in 1934, growing up in a decade of the first Japanese children in which mannered self-control was not the ideal civic behavior. This new perspective, coupled with the effects of war, exploded into the avant-garde art scene in Tokyo. Inelegant printing techniques emerged and the manic style of photography that Fukase shared with his contemporaries, among them Eikoh Hosoe, Daidoh Moriyama, and Shomei Tomatsu, reflected the "reaction to a world turned upside down."

Masahisa Fukase's work was included in the important 1986 exhibition Black Sun: The Eyes of Four, which traveled from The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, to The Philadelphia Museum of Art. This show brought Fukase's work, as well as the other three contemporary Japanese photographers, to the attention of the American art world. He recently exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France as well as the Foundation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris.

For additional information, please contact Kira Lyons (415)433-6879.