Museums, Miami
Keiichi Tanaami
Memory Collage
ICA MiamiThe Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presents Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage, the artist's first US solo museum exhibition. Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024, Tokyo) is a pioneering figure in Japanese and global Pop art, creating immersive works across media to explore American and Japanese culture in the post-war period. Tanaami's work anticipates the crossover of popular culture and fine art and takes a critical approach to how images of desire and violence alter society. Works included in this exhibition, produced between 1965 and 2024, track the artist's use of collage to express the complex media landscape of our time. Tanaami's life is deeply informed by his upbringing in Japan, the trauma of the Second World War, and the country's postwar reconstitution. Although the war forced Tanaami and his mother to flee to the countryside in 1943, the immense impact of United States air raids on Tokyo and his experiences in air raid shelters haunt his imagination. Tanaami's hallucinatory works brim with American airplanes, search lights, monsters real and imagined, and fleeing masses. Sexual imagery and synthetic colors permeate his works, with Tanaami recording popular culture commercializing desire to suppress the devastation of war. He graduated from the Musashino Art University, Kodaira, Japan, with a degree in graphic design in 1960, forging a successful career in design and advertising. As the first art director of Japanese Playboy and creator of record covers for Jefferson Airplane and the Monkees, Tanaami contributed to the introduction of psychedelic culture in Japan. During the 1960s, Tanaami's artistic practice frequently took the form of exuberant collages overflowing with clippings from international magazines. These dense collages serve as fascinating indexes of postwar visual culture, drawing from Western and Japanese news sources, commercial forms, and chapbooks. Tanaami elaborated on these image sets through engaging musical, surreal, and psychedelic animations that are now classics of avant-garde film. Combining disparate media, Tanaami creates worlds that explore how war distorts perception through fragmentation, nightmares, and hallucinatory visions. During the 1970s, his iconic paintings combine idyllic landscapes with advertising, erotic imagery, and anti-war slogans. In recent years, Tanaami has explored the role of the artist in visual culture through his Pleasure of Picasso (2020–) series, which use appropriation and repetition to reflect on the flattening of social and commercial art and history today. Additionally, the exhibition concisely surveys Tanaami’s recent work, a period of great productivity and experimentation for the artist. In epically large-scale painting and complex moving image, the artist has deployed technology to scale his kaleidoscopic visions. Through these radically produced, digitally printed and visually saturated paintings, Tanaami reflects on a contemporary regime of pervasive images, and the ever-present specter of history. Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, and Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami, with the assistance of Donna Honarpisheh, Associate Curator of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami.