Solo exhibition:
Shizuko Yoshikawa
Gregor Staiger Gallery, Zurich

Opening: 28 November, 2024
On view through January 11, 2025

With a background in architecture and design, Yoshikawa (1934, Ōmuta, Japan-2019, Zurich, Switzerland) came to Europe in the early 1960s to attend the Bauhaus-inspired Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm before joining the studio of her future husband Josef Müller-Brockmann in Zurich. She worked successfully in graphic design and lectured on grid systems (including at Yale University in 1965) before turning more and more to an artistic practice in the 1970s and becoming one of the leading artists of the second generation of Concrete Art, following artists such as Max Bill, Camille Graeser and Verena Loewensberg.

Focusing on works from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, this exhibition explores the foundations of Yoshikawa’s practice and early developments within this period: from her colour relief works on wood and polyester, which grew out of projects in architecture, to a focus on canvas and a subsequent move away from strictly rectangular patterns, to experiments with the rotation of geometries that related to both the canvas itself and the paint.

This exhibition is the first solo exhibition of Yoshikawa’s work in Zurich since her death in 2019. Julien Fronsacq curated an exhibition of the artist’s work at MAMCO in Geneva last autumn, while the Marlborough Gallery held a major solo exhibition in London earlier this year taken care of by Anke Kempkes & Gabrielle Schaad. In December, a major retrospective of Yoshikawa’s work and Müller-Brockmann’s design legacy will open at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka.