Hollis Taggart’s proposal for Untitled Art’s Special Projects centers on the geometric paintings of Japanese-American artist Ralph Iwamoto (1927-2013).

These paintings, spanning the years 1965 to 1975, add historical depth to our main booth’s presentation of a transoceanic dialogue among four contemporary artists and their visions of abstraction as informed by their cultural backgrounds. Iwamoto, who witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a teenager, created early work that synthesized the geometric abstraction of Cubism, Surrealist motifs, and flat, planar characteristics of traditional Japanese art. In the 1960s, Iwamoto began exploring geometric abstraction, taking further the visual language of flat planes seen only nascently in his earlier works. While working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, Iwamoto formed close friendships with artists Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Dan Flavin, who would later go on to become the core group of the Minimalism movement. Influenced by their stylistic and formal innovations, Iwamoto began experimenting with pure color and form and rigorous geometricism, as seen in these works. Through Minimalism, Iwamoto saw the potential for a method by which he could explore and express a universal truth and in the early 1970s, he began to work specifically with the octagon as his “shape within a grid.” Inspired by his friend LeWitt’s right angle and left angle compositions, as well as the work of Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Iwamoto mined ways to syncopate a grid through seemingly infinite permutations of an octagon and a minimal color palette. He often worked with groups of four (as in Red Blue Move (4 Octagons)), eight (which he termed “Octagon Concepts”), and sixteen octagons (“Factors”) in grid format and went on to use the octagon in increasingly complex arrangements. Like the other four artists in our main booth, Iwamoto put forth his vision of abstraction, inflected by both American minimalism and Japanese hard-edge planar elements.