Atsuko Tanaka (artist)

Tanaka was born in Osaka, on February 10, 1932. She had four older sisters and four older brothers. She studied at the Department of Western Painting at Kyoto Municipal College of Art (now Kyoto City University of Arts) in 1950 and left to attend the Art Institute of Osaka Municipal Museum of Art from 1951. During her study at college, Tanaka befriended her upperclassman Akira Kanayama. Kanayama advised her to explore new artistic languages and later invited her to join an artists' collective, Zero Society (Zero-kai), which he co-founded with other young artists, including Kazuo Shiraga and Saburo Murakami. During an extended period of hospitalization in 1953, Tanaka started to create non-figurative artworks. Inspired by the calendar with which she counted days, Tanaka began to make a series of works that consisted of handwritten numbers on various collaged materials, including hemp cloth, tracing paper, and newspaper. After joining Gutai, Tanaka created several iconic works such as Electric Dress (1956), Work (Bell, 1956), and Work (Pink Rayon, 1955) that earned both public attention and positive responses from art critics. In 1972, Tanaka and her husband moved to Nara. In her post-Gutai period, Tanaka mainly created large paintings, applying synthetic resin enamel paints to horizontally laid canvases. She developed unique motifs of colorful circles and intertwining lines from her earlier drawings inspired by Electric Dress and Bell. Her paintings from this period continued to attract attention in Japan and from abroad. On December 3, 2005, Tanaka died of pneumonia after a traffic accident, aged 73. ==Involvement with the Gutai movement==

In 1952, Akira Kanayama introduced Tanaka to his colleagues in Zero-kai (Zero Society), an experimental art group he co-founded with Shiraga Kazuo and Murakumi Saburo. Tanaka soon joined this association. In the meantime, Jiro Yoshihara, an established artist and critic, was offering private lessons on Western-style oil painting. Influenced by abstract art that emerged in Tokyo, Yoshihara envisioned a new kind of art that would "create what has never been done before." In 1954, Yoshihara and other young artists, mainly like-minded students of his, founded the Gutai Art Association. Around June 1955, Yoshihara sent Gutai artist Shimamoto Shozo to invite members of Zero Society, including Tanaka, to join Gutai. Tanaka, as well as other members of Zero Society, became central figures of Gutai after they joined. Their non-figurative artistic experiments contributed to further radicalizing Gutai art. Tanaka's works were featured in all exhibitions held by Gutai from 1955 to 1965. After she left Gutai, exhibitions in both Japan and the West continued to include her iconic works such as Bell (1955) and Electric Dress (1956) as emblematic of the experiment carried out by Gutai. ==Work==

Tanaka's abstract paintings, sculptures, performances and installations challenged conventional notions of how works of art should appear or "perform". Bell (1955) Inspired by her outdoor installation Pink Rayon (1955), Tanaka created Bell in 1955. It consisted of a string of twenty electric bells and a button with the sign "Please feel free to push the button, Atsuko Tanaka". However, viewers also "experience[d] the terror of being responsible for yourself". Tanaka was inspired by dazzling neon signs in urban Osaka to create Electric Dress. Additionally, dressmaking as a hobby gained popularity among Japanese women. Tanaka herself had applied to a dressmaking school and remained an amateur seamstress. By creating Electric Dress, which entrapped its wearer's body, Tanaka critically reconsidered the confinement imposed by fashion on the female body. Stage Clothes (1956 performance) Tanaka's performance Stage Clothes (1956) also critically engaged the issue of fashion, body, and gender. Tanaka designed a multi-layer costume with trick sleeves removeable parts. In the performance, she peeled off the layers one by one to reveal the outfits underneath. A gigantic pink dress with 9.1 m long sleeves was placed in the background behind her. Although the performance resembled a striptease show, Tanaka's expressionless face and unemotional movements refused an eroticized reading of her body and actions. == Exhibitions and collection ==

In the 2000s, Tanaka's works were featured in numerous expositions in Japan and abroad, including at the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, the Nagoya Gallery HAM, the New York Grey Art Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery as well as at the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck. The Grey Art Gallery focuses on Tanaka's Gutai period and also includes a video and documentation of the movement plus a reconstructed version of Electric Dress. In 2005, the University of British Columbia's Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver mounted a major exhibition of Tanaka's work entitled "Electrifying art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954-1968". Electric Dress and other works were on display at the 2007 documenta 12 in Kassel. A major retrospective exhibition, "Atsuko Tanaka: The Art of Connecting", travelled to Birmingham, Castelló and Tokyo in 2011-2012. Atsuko Tanaka's work is included in a number of internationally important public collections, including that of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. MoMA's online collection features a large, untitled 1964 work by Tanaka (synthetic polymer paint on canvas). Nearly tall and over wide, this piece, according to MOMA's online description, "evolved from Tanaka's performance Electric Dress", and "vividly records the artist's gestural application of layers and skeins of multicolored acrylic paint on the canvas as it lay on the floor." The Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, owns a reconstruction of Tanaka's Electric Dress made in 1999 at the occasion of a Gutai retrospective held at the Jeu de Paume. Tanaka was highlighted as a pioneer of abstraction in the exhibition Women in Abstraction, curated by Christine Macel and shown at the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2021. ==See also==