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.

Tadasky, born Tadasuke Kuwayama in Nagoya, Japan in 1935 has lived and worked in New York since 1961. He had numerous solo exhibitions at both the Kootz Gallery and legendary Fischbach Gallery in New York. His paintings were included in the seminal Op art exhibitions, The Responsive Eye, 1965, MoMA, NY and Kinetic and Optical Art Today, 1965, Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY, as well as more than 35 other group exhibitions. Most recently, his paintings have been included in Optic Art: Perceptual Art of the 1960s, 2007, Columbus Museum of Art, curated by Joe Houston. Tadasky’s work is included in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY; Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Museum Art Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Gutai Pinacotheca, Osaka, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagaoka, Japan; Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan, among others.

Tadasky by Donald Kuspit as heard on Adobe Airstream