Kansuke Yamamoto

Exhibition: 4 December 2024 – 24 January 2025

Michael Hoppen is delighted to announce a solo exhibition dedicated to the photography of Japanese Surrealist artist Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987). Vintage prints from the artist’s estate in Tokyo, including unique collages and solarised compositions, will be on display at our gallery in 10 Portland Road from December 4th. An illustrated monograph dedicated to Yamamoto’s work will also be on sale, strictly limited to an edition of 125 copies. Yamamoto’s creative practice began to emerge during the 1930s, when he started studying French, writing poetry and constructing his first collage compositions from newspaper headlines and cutouts. Touring exhibitions and independent journals continued to feed Japanese enthusiasm for European Surrealism throughout this period, and in 1939 Yamamoto co-founded the Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde.

In spite of the suspicion, and increasingly repression, with which avant-garde movements were treated by Japan’s imperial authorities, Yamamoto persisted in refining his distinctive perspective, combining graphic boldness with a kind of visual lyricism. His playful approach to juxtaposition invoked everyday objects in unfamiliar, symbolically charged constellations, that resonate with the Surrealist visions of his peers from across the international avant garde.

Yamamoto’s oeuvre has enjoyed a revival of critical interest in the 21st century, following Tokyo Station Gallery’s major solo exhibition in 2001. Yamamoto was subsequently selected as one of the focusses of the double retrospective Japan’s Modern Divide at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2013). More recently his work has been displayed as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s touring exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders (2022) and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s show Avant-Garde Rising (2022). His photography is included in the permanent collections of the Nagoya City Art Museum, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and The Art Institute of Chicago.