Adrian Rosenfeld is pleased to announce Tadaaki Kuwayama and Rakuko Naito, the next exhibition at his gallery in San Francisco. Organized with Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles, the show features works by two groundbreaking Japanese artists. Kuwayama and Naito moved to New York as a young couple in 1958, as Abstract Expressionism’s influence began to wane. Invigorated by debates animating the New York scene, they became formative figures in the development of Minimalism.
 
Working alongside colleagues like Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Dan Flavin, Kuwayama began experimenting with monochromatic painting in the early 1960s. His works appeared in solo shows at the Green Gallery in 1961 and 1962 and three years later in Lawrence Alloway’s famous Systemic Painting exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Since then, Kuwayama has perfected a unique surface for his multi-panel works made with paint and aluminum and created transformative installations with serial forms in various metals and unconventional colors. 
 
Soon after settling in New York, Naito began investigating the nature and limits of visual experiences in paintings that deconstruct perspectival systems and master the vibrational effects associated with contemporaries like Bridget Riley and Josef Albers. More recently, she has turned to photocollages and monochromatic sculptures made with Japanese paper. Both bodies of work evoke the natural world even as they appeal to a very human desire for precision, regularity, and repetition.
 
Bridging six decades of work, Tadaaki Kuwayama and Rakuko Naito offers a glimpse into the richness of these artists’ long careers, celebrating their converging interests in geometry, texture, and serial form as well as the ways their respective practices have diverged over time. 

Works by Tadaaki Kuwayama are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Rakuko Naito's work is in the collections of the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; the Kemper Art Collection, Chicago; and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Buenos Aires.