NEW YORK, NY.- Erik Thomsen Gallery is presenting Post-War Japanese Calligraphy, featuring major works by two leading masters: Yuichi Inoue (1916-85) and Shiryu Morita (1912-98). Morita's sprawling, powerful forms crystallize the actions used in their execution, while Inoue's emotive single-character works preserve the linguistic essence of sho (calligraphy), treading an expressive line between text and pure abstraction.

Inoue Yūichi 井上有一 (1916-1985)
Yūichi's early experiments were shown in New York six decades ago in the summer of 1954, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted the exhibition Japanese Calligraphy.

40 years later Yūichi's searing masterpiece Ah, Yokokawa National School (1978), a work inspired by the horrors of wartime bombing, provoked comparison with Picasso's Guernica when it was included in the exhibition Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, curated by Alexandra Munroe and held at the Guggenheim Museum in 2015.

Often compared with Franz Kline, Yūichi's achievement above all rests in his success in straddling West and East, in combining two visual languages-written characters and abstract expressionism--to convey deeply felt inner conflict and anguish. The strokes of his kanji, sometimes so thick that they are more mass than line, explode onto the paper with a visceral energy that cries out for our total attention. Yūichi's eccentric and wonderfully sparse works create a new world in which clarity of meaning and intensity of emotion are fused into an integral whole.

The featured works in this exhibition are included in the monumental 3volume catalogue raisonné published from 1996 to 2000.

Morita Shiryū 森田子龍 (1912-1998)
Born in Toyooka, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, Morita lectured and traveled extensively throughout his life. He was a founder of the Bokujin Group in 1952, an important association of Japanese calligraphers, which ranks among the most influential and innovative of the postwar avant-garde traditional arts groups.

Morita’s works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, Australia and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He participated twice in the Sao Paulo Biennale. In 1962 Morita helped organize ‘Schrift und Bild’ (“Writing and Image”), which was held the following year in Baden-Baden at the National Museum of Fine Arts, after which the exhibition traveled to Amsterdam. He had many solo gallery exhibitions in Kyoto, Brussels, Paris and New York.

His groundbreaking and intense style of abstracted calligraphy, motion and action with the brush are as important as the characters he chooses to paint. In The Art Institute of Chicago’s essay about ‘Dragon Knows Dragon’ (the work in the Institute’s collection) the following characterization is written: “The notion of abstraction had been part of the practice of East Asian calligraphy for many centuries and Morita wrote often about the interplay between traditional Japanese calligraphy and abstract art in the West. He collaborated with European artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement such as Pierre Alechinsky and Georges Mathieu, and American artists Mark Tobey and Franz Kline influenced and were influenced by contemporary Japanese calligraphy such as Morita’s works.”

In Morita’s own words: “In the Orient the mere act of writing characters had an honorable history of three thousand years since it was raised to the level of a fine art called Sho. While the act of writing characters may appear to be no more than the movement of the hand or body, what we mean by sho is something different.”

Much like Inoue Yūichi’s work, Morita’s calligraphy became so evolved and full of movement that some of the characters that he painted need identification, so the viewer can understand the meaning.