Jun 14, 2017
David Richard Gallery is pleased to present The Circle ReViewed: 1964 to 2012, a career retrospective and the gallery’s first solo exhibition for Tadasky (Tadasuke Kuwayama).
Throughout Tadasky’s career, the circle has been his primary subject as he explored numerous approaches to painting and applying color to canvas. In addition to circles comprised of perfectly and colorfully painted stripes, Tadasky has painted his famous stripes on narrow rectangular and large triangular-shaped canvases, but he always returned to the circular compositions. His paintings from the 1960s were complex, hard-edged circular stripes of bright colors that created pulsating and vibrating optical effects. Later the edges of the circles became broken and uneven, more painterly and less defined. Later still, the circles themselves became more atmospheric, diffuse and ethereal. Since 2007, Tadasky has reintroduced optical effects by infusing his atmospheric circles with brightly colored drips of paint that activate the surface and create a three-dimensional illusion as though the circles bulge out of the picture plane. As Donald Kuspit emphasizes in the catalogue essay, the circles are pure modern abstractions, yet the combination of the brightly colored concentric rings centered in the square canvas is reminiscent of mandalas, invoking a spiritual connotation; a Zen sensibility.