NEW YORK, NY.- Alison Bradley Projects announced that Yuki Katsura’s 1953 painting Towering Rage (怒髪天をつく) has entered the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Towering Rage offers important insight into the evolution of Yuki Katsura’s career, especially her skillful use of traditional motifs as a subterfuge for her political sentiments. Having survived the wartime devastation of Tokyo and the political conversion of many of her artist peers, Katsura dedicated herself to a bold new body of political works in the tumultuous years of the early 1950s—works that engaged with the impacts of the U.S. Occupation, the end of Japanese imperialism, and the adoption of a new democratic constitution.

Dohatsu ten o tsuku, the work’s original Japanese title, is an idiom that conveys a fury so intense that one’s hair stands upright and reaches the heavens—sentiments that can be observed in the fearsome expression of the three-headed yellow creature in this painting. The figure can be interpreted as the artist’s evocation of various traditional figures such as the iconic Japanese oni (ogre), hannya and shinnya masks of Noh theater, as well as a number of wrathful three-faced Buddhist deities. In particular, it appears to share characteristics of the Batō Kannon, one of the six transformations of the Bodhisattva Kannon and the guardian of the animal realm. The Batō Kannon’s characteristic sharp fangs, lion’s mane, and equine features of a horse’s mouth and neck can be observed in Towering Rage. Katsura’s decision to add horns atop the figure’s head is very characteristic of her interest in combining visual archetypes as a way to recast traditional allegories and destabilize fixed meanings, reflecting her desire to be “able to paint only what [she] wanted, without being beholden to anyone."

Katsura’s clear understanding of the principles of abstraction come through in her unique construction of the angry deity in Towering Rage. Heavy contrast, dark outline, and the flattening of the figure’s intimidating features demonstrate Katsura’s movement away from realism at this stage in her career. She instead employed caricature in its figuration, using a collage-like technique to build up the paint with dynamic blocks of color that bring the looming head to life, depicting off-kilter eyes framed by sharp bundles of golden hair that explode outward, echoing the title of the work as they almost escape the pictorial frame.

Towering Rage has been exhibited in Yuki Katsura, Works from 1950's, 1960's & 1970's, Tokyo Gallery, Japan (1978); Between Objects and Images: Yuki Katsura Exhibition, Ikebukuro Seibu Department Store, Tokyo, Japan (1986); New Images of Man, Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, (2020); and most recently in her solo exhibition Fierce Autonomy, Alison Bradley Projects, New York, (2021).