Effetto Araki
21 June 2019 - 30 September 2019curated by F. Maggia
A major new exhibition devoted to Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki
Siena celebrates the great Japanese photographer with a selection of 2200 pictures spanning a career of more than 50 years. The exhibition, organized by the Santa Maria della Scala with the support of Opera-Civita, is curated by Filippo Maggia, showcases photographs from over twenty series taken by Araki from the early 1960s to the present day. Araki was eager to celebrate his work over the past 50 years (he held his first show in 1965) with a selection of 2200 works reviewing his long artistic career and offering a virtually complete overview of his endless, highly complex and multi-faceted output, which stretches well beyond the bondage pictures that have made him a household name worldwide. Many of the series – Satchin and his brother Mabo, Sentimental night in Kyoto, August, Tokyo Autumn and others – are being shown in Italy for the very first time, and for some of them – for example Anniversary of Hokusai’s Death and Gloves – it is also their European debut, while the Araki’s Paradise collection, consisting of photographs that Araki took using his own home as his set, has been specially produced for the Siena exhibition: thus an original, meditative and exciting Araki who appears to wish to condense his entire experience both as an artist and as a man in this show.
The exhibition is completed by a video tracking Araki as he chooses the photographs for the exhibition in the company of curator Filippo Maggia and a catalogue book, published by Skira, containing a selection of 300 photographs chosen from among those on display in the exhibition.
Livello 6.
21 June 2019 - 30 September 2019
Opening hours
Daily
10.00 a.m.-07.00 p.m. (last entrance 6 pm)
The author
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Araki completed his studies at Chiba University’s Department of Engineering with a focus on the study of film and photography. With his first series, Satchin and his brother Mabo, which was inspired by the Italian Neorealism film movement, he took pictures of the vivid life of two children living in the downtown area of Tokyo. In 1964 with this series he was awarded with the Taiyo Magazine prize, shortly after he had joined the advertising agency Dentsu, where he worked until 1972. He met his wife Yoko, who was a secretary at Dentsu, to whom he paid homage in Sentimental Journey, a photographic record of their honeymoon published in 1971. His beloved Yoko passed away in 1990 and Araki documented her last days and funeral (Winter Journey).
His inquiring mind for the possibility of the photography never stops. He is always fascinated by women’s nudes, kinbaku (bondage in Japanese traditional way), skyscapes, flowers, and landscapes in Tokyo. He describes the photography as “copy” or “reproduction” of objects, because he thinks all charm exists in the objects themselves and what he does is only extracting their nature.
