KENJI YOSHIDA at Frieze Masters 2025 | Stand S03
The Regent’s Park, London
15 – 19 October, 2025
15 – 19 October, 2025
Oil on paper, 24 x 24 cm.
Oil on paper, 39 x 54 cm.
Yoshida (b.1924, Japan - d.2009, Japan) studied art under Furukido Masaru. Aged 19, he was conscripted and consigned to become a kamikaze pilot. While many of his comrades flew away to certain death, Yoshida’s eventual survival came about only because the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 80 years ago in 1945, precipitated Japan’s sudden surrender. These traumatic experiences left Yoshida profoundly conscious of the fragility of life and the proximity of death, an awareness that permeates all the work that followed. Returning to his art, Yoshida moved to Paris, in the early 60s, to study graphic art techniques at Stanley Hayter’s influential Atelier 17. The London-born Hayter had been instrumental. in teaching many celebrated artists – Miro, Picasso, Giacometti, Rothko, Pollock and Dali, to name but a few – by encouraging experimentation and insisting that more than mere technique, printmaking was itself a creative activity.
The works from the 60s and 70s highlight Yoshida’s flowering in this heady environment, as he began to produce innovative etchings using subtle varieties of colours to highlight primary forms on the same plate. The 60s etchings already show Yoshida exploring metallic effects that lead into the delicate serigraphs and oil and ink on paper works of the 70s. We again see him investigating the possibilities offered by gold and silver leaf as he moves ever more confidently towards the mesmerising multi-panelled works of the 80s and 90s, where highly mobile forms reveal the influence of European formalist abstraction while also recalling the irregular forms that pattern the grounds of traditional Japanese screen painting.
Employing this elliptical language of coloured forms often rendered in silver and gold leaf, Yoshida invites the viewer to consider the fundamental forces of life and to meditate upon that essential unity which binds all living beings together. Nearly all of Yoshida’s later canvases bear the single recurring title of La Vie (Life); being passionate cries of gratitude and celebrations of the cosmic mystery that is Life. Yoshida’s entire oeuvre expresses his fervent desire that Life be considered precious beyond price and its nemesis (War) be rejected. While memorialising the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we remember the dictum that underlines every one of Yoshida’s plangent works: “Life brightens most when Peace prevails...”
About Kenji Yoshida Born in 1924, Ikeda City, Japan. Died in 2009, Tokyo, Japan.
Before the outbreak of World War II, Yoshida studied art under Masaru Furukido. During the 1950’s, he presented several solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Japan. In 1964, Yoshida left Japan permanently and moved to Paris, the acknowledged centre of Modernism. This relocation brought Yoshida’s work into contact with the artistic movements of the time. He was confronted by the heady shock of the Abstract Expressionists, in particular Rothko and Motherwell, who both employ similarly abstract forms in striving for the transcendent spirituality that characterises Yoshida’s art. During the 70’s and 80s, Yoshida exhibited widely across Europe with solo exhibitions in 1974 at the Modern-Art Galerie, Vienna, Austria and in 1977, at Galerie Point W., Gaillard, France. In 1989, Yoshida presented his first solo exhibition at October Gallery, London.
In 1993, the significant qualities of Yoshida’s work were recognised when he was honoured as the first living artist ever to be given a solo exhibition at the Japanese Galleries of the British Museum, London. His final exhibition, in 2008, was in the main hall of UNESCO in the centre of Paris – the city that reciprocated his choice to make it his home by adopting him as one of her own artists and providing him with a studio for life.
