Tadanori Yokoo, Saint Michael – Success Through Aspiration, Large Serigraph for sale at Pamono

Description

The artwork we are presenting is a huge original silkscreen by Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo, also called “the Japanese Andy Warhol”. It is one of a set of three, issued in 1990 in a numbered edition of 100 only and signed by the artist – also, the other two are available, all bearing the same edition number.
They represent Catholic fighting angels/saints subduing the Evil (this is St. Michael Archangel trampling the Devil, while in the others it’s St. George defeating the Dragon).
The artist followed the traditional iconography adding his graphic pop signature. They are published in the official catalogue of his works, “Tadanori Yokoo, The Complete Prints”, where a variant of this very Saint George, titled Divine Symbol, has been chosen for the cover.

Tadanori Yokoo
Success Through Aspiration
Screenprint on paper
Size: 165 x 100 cm
Year 1990
Signed bottom right Yokoo
Edition of 100 only
Numbered bottom left 3 / 100

One of the most famous image by the artist.
Catalogue Raisonn:
Tadanori Yokoo, The Complete Prints, ref. 150, ill. p. 99

The Artist
Tadanori Yokoo, born in Nishiwaki, Hygo Prefecture, Japan, in 1936, is one of Japan’s most successful and internationally recognised graphic designers and artists. He began his career as a stage designer for avantgarde theatre in Tokyo.
His early work shows the influence of the New York-based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular), but Yokoo cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima as two of his most formative influences.
In the late 1960s he became interested in mysticism and psychedelia, deepened by travels in India. Because his work was so attuned to 1960s pop culture, he has often been described as the “Japanese Andy Warhol” or likened to psychedelic poster artist Peter Max, but Yokoo’s complex and multi-layered imagery is intensely autobiographical and entirely original.
By the late 60s he had achieved international recognition for his work and was included in the 1968 “Word & Image” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Four years later MoMA mounted a solo exhibition of his graphic work organised by Mildred Constantine. Yokoo collaborated extensively with Shji Terayama and his theater Tenj Sajiki. He starred as a protagonist in Nagisa Oshima’s film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.

In 1968 Yukio Mishima claimed,
“Tadanori Yokoo’s works reveal all of the unbearable things which we Japanese have inside ourselves and they make people angry and frightened. He makes explosions with the frightening resemblance which lies between the vulgarity of billboards advertising variety shows during festivals at the shrine devoted to the war dead and the red containers of Coca Cola in American Pop Art, things which are in us but which we do not want to see.”

The Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art was opened in November 2012 in the refurbished west wing of the Oji Branch of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.