Tatsuo Ikeda Exhibition

A pioneer on Tokyo's postwar avant-garde scene, Tatsuo Ikeda (born 1928) is renowned for his figurative paintings, all featuring a dose of surrealism and expressing the deeply felt anguish of the atomic age. Having been trained as a kamikaze pilot during the war, Ikeda was always very critical of the 1945 settlement that saw the emperor system retained in Japan, but his work took an even more socially conscious turn after the Korean War. His contribution to the 1954 edition of the radical Yomiuri Independent exhibition shined a spotlight on the activism aimed at preventing the construction of a American military training facility in Ishikawa prefecture, and made the Saga native's name in the then very political Japanese art world. This display focuses on work created after 1990 and consists of around 20 pieces.