Frieze Seoul 2023 – Tiger Tateishi prints
Frieze Seoul 2023
Booth: C24
Artist：Tiger Tateishi
Silkscreen, 1973-74
Silkscreen on paper
frame size: H87xW67xD3cm (each)
Edition of 100 (each)
Silkscreen, 1978-79
Silkscreen on paper
frame size: H57xW45xD2.5cm (each)
Edition of 100 (each)
In the midst of his promising career in Japan, Tateishi moved to Milan in 1969, and began working on paintings. Taking Robert Sheckley’s science fiction story “Untouched By Human Hands” and other works as inspiration, his attempt to create paintings using the format of manga led him to create comic-strip paintings that told nonsensical stories while transforming time, space, and form.
Soon after, his works caught the eye of Alexandre Iolas, a prominent gallerist of the time who introduced artists such as René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Ed Ruscha. Around 100 comic-strip oil paintings were produced by the end of the 1970s, and some of them were reproduced as silkscreen prints by the artist himself.
Tateishi’s works also attracted attention from the Italian architectural and design community. He was introduced to Ettore Sottsass, a renowned architect and designer, and worked for several years from 1971 as an illustrator at the Sottsass Institute of Industrial Design in Olivetti. At that time in Italy, there was a growing momentum to question the existing system and rebel against the consumer society, and anti-architecture and anti-design movements grew evident. Utopia and dystopia were widely discussed, and Sottsass’s magazine project “The Planet as Festival” embodies this trend. These utopian worlds, published in 1972 in “Casabella”, were originally drawn by Tateishi.
*Itaru Hrano, “3. 1969 – 1982,” TIGER Tateishi: The Retrospective, Chiba City Museum of Art, Aomori Museum of Art, Takamatsu Art Museum, The Museum Of Modern Art, Saitama, Urawa Art Museum, 2021, p.49