Aki Kuroda – Biography

Aki Kuroda, born in 1944 in Kyoto, began painting at the age of three. As a child, he was fascinated by the surrealist magazine Minotaure that his father received from Paris. He exhibited for the first time at the age of 10. In his youth, Aki studied art history, traveled, stayed in New York then in Paris where he settled permanently in 1970. His first personal exhibition took place in 1978, in Germany since then, his works have been regularly the subject of major exhibitions: Doland Museum in Shanghai, Museums of Modern Art, Tokyo and Osaka, European House of Photography in Paris, Museum of Imperial City in Beijing, National Museum in Bratislava, Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul- de-Vence, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin.

Aki Kuroda is closely linked to the literary world. Marguerite Duras accompanies her first exhibition with an original text. From 1985 to 1994, with Yoyo Maeght and Didier Ottinger - today deputy director of the Center Pompidou in Paris - they published Noise. In 2017, Éditions Gallimard gave him carte blanche to illustrate Shakespeare's Hamlet in a work embellished with 50 original drawings .

Aki Kuroda freely develops his artistic research in painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, scenography, sets, installation, performance or happening, all these expressions making up the immense Cosmogarden project.

One Man Shows Aki Kuroda - Selection

2022: Yoyo Maeght, Workshop Secrets, Paris

2022: Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York

2021: Yoyo Maeght - Paris

2021 : Tokyo Art Acceleration - Mori Yu Gallery

2021 : Galerie Louis Gendre, Chamalières , Clermont Métropole

2020 : Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York, United States

2019: Chartres Museum of Fine Arts , Chartres

2019: Lapidary Museum, Avignon

2019: Hall of the Dominicans, Saint-Émilion

2018 : Paris Aquarium

2018 : Hangar Art Center, Brussels, Belgium

2017 : Espai K, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Spain

2016 : Galerie Louis Gendre, Chamalières, Clermont Métropole

2015 : Nikki Diana Marquardt Gallery, Paris

2015 : Mori Yu Gallery, Kyoto, Japan

2015 : Galerie Louis Gendre, Chamalières, Clermont Métropole

2015: Sablons Art Center, Neuilly sur Seine

2014: Alexandre Lazarew Gallery, Paris

2014: Biwako Biennale, Japan

2013: KH Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2011: Roppongi Hills A/D Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2011: Mori Yu Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2010: European House of Photography, Paris

2010: Saint-Émilion Art Center

2008: Doland Museum, Shanghai, China

2007: TS1 Museum, Beijing, China

2007: Beijing Imperial Museum, China

2004: Cultural Space of Arts, Trèbes

2002: Château de Bellecour Museum, Pithiviers

2001: Scène Nationale d’Orléans

1998: Ham Gallery, Nagoya, Japan

1998: Proarta Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland

1997: Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1997: La Manufacture des Œillets, Ivry

1997 : Otemae Art Center, Kobe, Japan

1996: Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

1996: Chalon-sur-Saône art center

1996: Imura Art Gallery, Kyoto, Japan

1995: Galerie Debras Bical, Brussels, Belgium

1995: Kaj Forsblom Gallery, Helsinki, Finland

1994: National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan

1994: Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

1994: French Institute, Zagreb, Croatia

1994: Museum of Fine Arts, Clermont-Ferrand

1994: Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil

1994: Museum Le Parvis, Pau

1994: Imura Gallery, Kyoto, Japan

1993: Galleria Ellequadro, Genoa, Italy

1993: Imura Gallery, Kyoto, Japan

1993: Richter Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany

1993: National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan

1993: Ferme du Buisson Art Center, Noiseul

1992: National Gallery Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia

1992: School of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia

1992: Musée-Château du Roi René, Tarascon

1991: Spark Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

1990: Mayor Rowan Gallery, London, Great Britain

1990: Galerie Debras-Bical, Brussels, Belgium

1990: Egelund Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

1990: Galerie Gutsch, Berlin, Germany

1989: Contemporary art center, Troyes

1989: Sainte Chapelle Art Center at the Hôtel Dieu, Troyes

1989: Arsenal Art Center, Metz

1988: Nishimura Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

1988: Aeblegaarden Gallery, Holte, Denmark

1987: State Gallery, Saarbrücken, Germany

1987: Galerie La Main, Brussels, Belgium

1986: Takagi Gallery, Nagoya, Japan

1986: Château Fort Museum, Sedan

1984: Georg Nothelfer Gallery, Berlin, Germany

1983: Takagi Gallery, Nagoya, Japan

1983: N1 Studio, Nagoya, Japan

1982: Cultural Center, Tarbes

1980: Maeght Gallery, Paris

1979: Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, Belgium

1978: Kunsthalle, Bremerhaven, Germany

Aki Kuroda in a few lines

In his workshop, in 2019

Aki Kuroda is a Japanese artist who lives and works in Paris.

He was born on October 4, 1944 in Kyoto and began painting at the age of three. As a child, he was fascinated by the surrealist magazine Minotaure that his father received from Paris. Raised in a cultural environment, one of his ancestors was the first Japanese to visit Vincent van Gogh in his Parisian studio.
Aki Kuroda exhibited for the first time at the age of 10, he likes to say that he has been painting since he knew how to hold a brush.
Aki aged 5, Kyoto 1950.
In his youth, he met James Lee Byars who encouraged him to compose his first performances. Aki studied art history, traveled, stayed in New York then in Paris where he settled permanently in 1970.
He rarely visits museums, preferring the atmosphere of the city, the cafes, the streets. He stores images of places that fascinate him, Carnac, the squares of Rome, the palace of the Postman Cheval, the spooky garden of Bomarzo, the bullrings and the Corridas of Seville... But above all, he likes to analyze the movement of passers-by in Paris.
Kuroda, installation, Nagoya, 1983
In the 1970s, in Paris, he created installations with dried beans, pieces of wood and fragments of plaster to which he gave the shape of pebbles which he painted then scattered in large boxes placed on the ground. Without an audience, he clandestinely performs a nighttime performance in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Aki Kuroda's first solo exhibition took place in 1978 in Germany. In 1980, he was selected for the 11th Paris Biennale and in 1994 for the Sao Paulo Biennale.
Kuroda for the European Summit in 1987
His works are regularly the subject of major exhibitions: Doland Museum in Shanghai, Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Osaka, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, Museum of Imperial City in Beijing, National Museum in Bratislava, Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, Bouvet-Ladubay Art Center in Saumur, Casa França-Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, as well as various art centers and galleries in Brazil, Ireland, Japan , Germany, Denmark and the United States…
Installation in the Chapel of the Hôtel Dieu in Troyes, 1989
Masterful public and private commissions mark his career. Aki Kuroda has created mural works for architects Tadao Ando, ​​Pistre & Valode, Studio Nikken Sekki and Richard Rogers. Works for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, the National Customs School of Tourcoing (work listed in the supplementary inventory of historic monuments), the Leonard de Vinci University Center in La Défense, the Maison de la culture du Japan in Paris, the Mauboussin building in Tokyo, the Otemae Univerity in Japan, the Tokyo Dome City Hall or in a street in Paris, with a monumental painting facing the Ministry of Culture.
Kuroda for the Strasbourg Museum, the restaurant.

Aki Kuroda is closely linked to the literary world. Marguerite Duras accompanies her first exhibition at the Galerie Maeght with an original text. From 1985 to 1994, with Yoyo Maeght and Didier Ottinger - now deputy director of the Center Pompidou in Paris - they published Noise, an art magazine offering a comparison of original works by contemporary artists produced in lithography and unpublished texts by poets, writers and philosophers, a review in which Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Anne Tronche, Yves Simon, Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers, Pascal Quignard, Marcellin Pleynet participated, among others. In 1992 Noise received the Vasari Prize for best art magazine.

Hamlet illustrated by Aki Kuroda for Gallimard, 2017

In 2017, Éditions Gallimard gave him carte blanche to illustrate Shakespeare's Hamlet in a large volume embellished with 50 original drawings.

Aki Kuroda plays with space-time, the cosmos, the universe or reality. To nourish his imagination, he did not hesitate to get closer to great scientists, astrophysicists like Hubert Reeves, and continued his research with the designers of the Ariane rocket.

Aki Kuroda, “Passage of the Blue Hour” Show
 Pompidou Center, 1989

In parallel with his pictorial work, Aki Kuroda creates performance shows in which he mixes different artistic forms. He designs sets for ballets such as Parade performed by Angelin Preljocaj for the Paris Opera and the Avignon Festival or Passage de l'heure bleue for the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris.

He says he is a man of passages between cultures, between the East and the West, between the refined calm of the Zen universe and the bustle of graffiti, between the soul and the body, between archaic myths and the future to invent.

Aki Kuroda develops his artistic research freely and in all forms, in painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, scenography, sets, installation, performance or happening.

Aki Kuroda, “Parade” for the Opéra Garnier in Paris
and the Avignon Festival, 1993

The worlds of Aki Kuroda

Aki Kuroda likes to create worlds where the three axes of life mix and intertwine: the past, the present and the future.

Aki Kuroda questions man's place in the universe. He plays and plays with all dimensions, all distances, patiently, he explores the cosmos, time, silence, night.

In spaces that overlap and sometimes collide, Alice meets the rabbit, the Minotaur keeps watch, the planets wander, Ariadne's thread guides us through the labyrinth, mysterious animals fly over cities that emerge from the spatial night and organize themselves so that the human figure finds its place in their meanders.

In Aki Kuroda's work, themes come and return without concern for chronology, some are omnipresent and emerge as the creation progresses. This is why the production dates have no importance for Aki Kuroda.

In his work, subjects and themes appear, disappear and resurface over time, over the years.

What matters to him is to allow the passage between the different expressions of his art, but also between eras, civilizations, materiality and the immaterial, between the sidereal void of the Cosmos and our planet.

The human, in Kuroda's painting, seems to take on an almost geometric appearance, the figure has become a symbol.

Weeping through the light, 1991 - 270 x 160 cm
Blue Figure, 2008 - 300 x 200 cm
Passage VI, 2005 - 200 x 200 cm

Aki Kuroda seeks to disrupt the balance between figurative and non-figurative. For him, as for many artists such as Miró, Klee, Picabia or Man Ray, but also Rothko or Kelly, an abstract art which refuses the link to reality cannot exist.

Untitled red, 1989 - 270 x 160 cm

The female silhouette that punctuates his work resembles a caryatid. But this figure is not completely human, in a futuristic, and perhaps premonitory, projection, the being, freed from its fleshly envelope, takes on the appearance of a robot, cold and devoid of sensitivity.

Woodcuts, 1994 and engraving, 1990

Sometimes this slender shape transforms into a narrow opening, an entrance, a breach into another world. It becomes the passage between reality and dream, between Earth and the Cosmos.

“Sidéral Blue” exhibition
Bouver-Ladubay Art Center, Saumur, 2018

Kuroda 110492, Acrylic on paper 63 x 90 cm, 1990

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