Atsuko Tanaka (artist)

On December 3, 2005, Tanaka died of pneumonia after a traffic accident, aged 74.

In the 2000s, Tanaka's works were featured in numerous expositions in Japan and abroad, including at the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, the Nagoya Gallery HAM, the New York Grey Art Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery as well as at the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck. The Grey Art Gallery focuses on Tanaka's Gutai period and also includes a video and documentation of the movement plus a reconstructed version of Electric Dress. In 2005, the University of British Columbia's Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver mounted a major exhibition of Tanaka's work entitled "Electrifying art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954-1968". Electric Dress and other works were on display at the 2007 documenta 12 in Kassel. A major retrospective exhibition, "Atsuko Tanaka: The Art of Connecting", travelled to Birmingham, Castelló and Tokyo in 2011-2012.

As Tanaka's solo artistic career soared throughout the late 50s and early 60s, her relationship with Yoshihara Jiro became strained. Due to her mental instability and the tension within the group, Tanaka decided to leave Gutai in 1965 and married Kanayama. They moved into a house at the temple Myōhōji in Osaka. She produced most of her works at home and in the flat on the second floor of her parents' house, ten minutes from where she had lived. In 1972, Tanaka and her husband moved to Nara.

Atsuko Tanaka's work is included in a number of internationally important public collections, including that of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. MoMA's online collection features a large, untitled 1964 work by Tanaka (synthetic polymer paint on canvas). Nearly 12 feet (3.7 m) tall and over 7 feet (2.1 m) wide, this piece, according to MOMA's online description, "evolved from Tanaka's performance Electric Dress", and "vividly records the artist's gestural application of layers and skeins of multicolored acrylic paint on the canvas as it lay on the floor." The Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, owns a reconstruction of Tanaka's Electric Dress made in 1999 at the occasion of a Gutai retrospective held at the Jeu de Paume. Tanaka was highlighted as a pioneer of abstraction in the exhibition "Women in Abstraction", curated by Christine Macel and shown at the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2021.

Tanaka's well-known Electric Dress (1956) was a garment made of 200 lightbulbs that weighed over 50 kg. At the "2nd Gutai Art Exhibition" held in 1956, Tanaka wore Electric Dress and walked around in the gallery. Photographs of the performance show Tanaka covered from head to toe in the garment, with only her face and hands visible. The colored light bulbs flickered randomly, giving off the sensation of an alien creature and, according to Tanaka, "blink[ing] like fireworks."

Tanaka's performance Stage Clothes (1956) also critically engaged the issue of fashion, body, and gender. Tanaka designed a multi-layer costume with trick sleeves removeable parts. In the performance, she peeled off the layers one by one to reveal the outfits underneath. A gigantic pink dress with 9.1 m long sleeves was placed in the background behind her. Although the performance resembled a striptease show, Tanaka's expressionless face and unemotional movements refused an eroticized reading of her body and actions.

In 1955, Tanaka, Kanayama, and other members of Zero Society joined the Gutai Art Association, an avant-garde artists' group led by artist Yoshihara Jiro. After joining Gutai, Tanaka created several iconic works such as Electric Dress (1956), Work (Bell, 1956), and Work (Pink Rayon, 1955) that earned both public attention and positive responses from art critics. She also performed Stage Cloth (1957) at Gutai Art on the Stage, an event held by Gutai at the Sankei Hall in Osaka.

Tanaka, as well as other members of Zero Society, became central figures of Gutai after they joined. Their non-figurative artistic experiments contributed to further radicalizing Gutai art. Tanaka's works were featured in all exhibitions held by Gutai from 1955 to 1965. After she left Gutai, exhibitions in both Japan and the West continued to include her iconic works such as Bell (1955) and Electric Dress (1956) as emblematic of the experiment carried out by Gutai.

Inspired by her outdoor installation Pink Rayon (1955), Tanaka created Bell in 1955. It consisted of a string of twenty electric bells and a button with the sign "Please feel free to push the button, Atsuko Tanaka". In early versions of Bell, the bells were laid at two-meter intervals with each other to surround a gallery room. Once visitors pressed the button, it would make the bells ring in sequence for two minutes. The arrangement of the bells was adapted to different spaces at later exhibitions.

During an extended period of hospitalization in 1953, Tanaka started to create non-figurative artworks. Inspired by the calendar with which she counted days, Tanaka began to make a series of works that consisted of handwritten numbers on various collaged materials, including hemp cloth, tracing paper, and newspaper. In some of these works, Tanaka repeated and fragmented the numbers to de-naturalize the meaning of numerical signs.

In 1952, Akira Kanayama introduced Tanaka to his colleagues in Zero-kai (Zero Society), an experimental art group he co-founded with Shiraga Kazuo and Murakumi Saburo. Tanaka soon joined this association. In the meantime, Jiro Yoshihara, an established artist and critic, was offering private lessons on Western-style oil painting. Influenced by abstract art that emerged in Tokyo, Yoshihara envisioned a new kind of art that would "create what has never been done before." In 1954, Yoshihara and other young artists, mainly like-minded students of his, founded the Gutai Art Association. Around June in 1955, Yoshihara sent Gutai artist Shimamoto Shozo to invite members of Zero Society, including Tanaka, to join Gutai.

Atsuko Tanaka (田中 敦子, Tanaka Atsuko; February 10, 1932 – December 3, 2005) was a Japanese avant-garde artist. She was a central figure of the Gutai Art Association from 1955 to 1965. Her works have found increased curatorial and scholarly attention across the globe since the early 2000s, when she received her first museum retrospective in Ashiya, Japan, which was followed by the first retrospective abroad, in New York and Vancouver. Her work was featured in multiple exhibitions on Gutai art in Europe and North America.

Tanaka was born in Osaka, on February 10, 1932. She had four older sisters and four older brothers. She studied at the Department of Western Painting at Kyoto Municipal College of Art (now Kyoto City University of Arts) in 1950 and left to attend the Art Institute of Osaka Municipal Museum of Art from 1951.