Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist best known for her Neo-Dada Electric Dress (1956), a garment made from hundreds of lightbulbs painted in primary colors. This iconic work, which she wore to exhibitions, functions as a conflation of Japanese traditional clothing with modern urbanization, bringing an unexpected and challenging interpretation to both. “I wanted to shatter stable beauty with my work,” Tanaka once said. A member of the Gutai movement, much of her work used domestic objects like lightbulbs, textiles, doorknobs, and doorbells. With these objects, the artist was able to create work about the body without a body present. She maintained a broad practice that included performance “happenings,” sculpture, and installation, while her later work focusing on two-dimensional painting, with colorful organic abstract shapes connecting circles and lines.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Produced on the occasion of The Art of Connecting: Atsuko Tanaka at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, which illustrated an unprecedented balance between all aspects of Tanaka’s practice, ranging from her earliest gestures, including documentation of Gutai performances in the 1950s, to paintings made shortly before her death in 2005.

Through variety it conveys a remarkable consistency of vision, connecting art and everyday life as we know it. It articulates an artistic proposition that makes Tanaka one of the most important figures of the Japanese post-war avant-garde.