Shinkichi Tajiri - Sint Joris en de draak, zeefdruk (prachtig ingelijst) - Sold

Medium: lithography on paper
Size: 49.5 (h) x 60.5 (w) Title: 'Saint George and the dragon' from 1950 Signed in pencil 'S. Tajiri' (bottom right) Numbered in pencil 102/200 (bottom left) Dated 1950 (bottom right) Frame (silver) behind glass and passe-partout

Shinkichi Tajiri was born Shinkichi George Tajiri on December 7, 1923, in Los Angeles. He was a versatile artist. Although he has expressed himself in many disciplines, he contributed to Cobra as an experimental sculptor. He is also a painter and has been involved in photography, film and computer drawings. For Tajiri, versatile also means internationally oriented: American because of his place of birth, Japanese because of birth from Japanese parents of the old aristocratic Samurai lineage, French because his artistic career started in Paris, and Dutch because he has lived in the Netherlands since 1956. After World War II, he studied at the Art Institute in Chicago and began experimenting with three-dimensional objects. In 1948 he went to Paris where he took lessons with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967) and came into contact with the Dutch Cobra artists Karel Appel (1921-2006), Constant (1920-2005) and Corneille (1922-2010). . Because of his spontaneous working method and the major role he allowed the material to play in his work, he was included in their group and invited to participate in the major Cobra exhibitions in Amsterdam in 1949 and in Liège in 1951, where he made his debut with a warrior in cast. Of the first warriors (Samurai) who would return in various techniques, Tajiri stated: “they expressed my need to purify me from the horrors of war”. He depicted his experiences in spiky, iron-welded or bronze-cast aggressive assemblages with high-legged shapes and in symbols of violence, sex and fertility. In 1953, he created acid-and-nailed reliefs that he called “scorched earth” to show how ravaged that very earth with which he felt so connected. He expressed his astonishment at the tremendous vigor of nature in a series of cast iron, plant-like delicate statues, animated by an inner germination power. His fascination for the urge to live, to unfold into new unprecedented forms of nature, reached a peak in the poetic Zen garden that Tajiri designed in 1995 for the patio of the Cobra Museum of Modern Art entitled “Karesansui” which means dry landscape garden and once has been described as “an attempt to fathom the secret laws of nature, especially its proportions, rhythm, energy and movement”. Tajiri has convincingly integrated Eastern culture into Western art. His entire oeuvre is imbued with “silent dynamics”. The works radiate a great deal of energy while they are in “rest position”. This thinking in opposites that exist side by side, balance each other and can sometimes be equal, is characteristic of Eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism, and is typical Tajiri. From 1951 he had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, America and Japan, also in Cobra context. He participated in “The Art of Assembly” in 1961 in New York, the Venice Biennale in 1961 and the Documenta in Kassel in 1964.