Artist: Nagai Kiyoshi (1911-1984)
Title: The Clear Sky
Date: 1971
Edition: 1st Ed., 47/252
Sig./Seal: Kiyoshi Nagai (Pseudonym for Hiroyuki Tajima)
Condition: Very good with generalized toning in the margins
Size: 17.25 x 12.5                          $495
 
Nagai, Kiyoshi (Tajima, Hiroyuki)(1911-1984)
Kiyoshi Nagai is a pseudonym of the 20th-century abstract print artist Hiroyuki Tajima. While the artist's more experimental work is signed Hiroyuki Tajima, his landscapes and figural designs bear the signature 'Kiyoshi Nagai'.
Hiroyuki Tajima is a 20th century printmaker. Exploring rich colors and entrancing textures, Tajima’s abstract woodblock prints express a freedom and imagination. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes deeply sensitive, sometimes powerful, these abstract woodblock prints have the ability to emotionally move the viewer through innovative technique, luminous gold, and saturated, textured planes of color. His work is renowned as some of the most significant abstract art of the postwar period.
Born in Tokyo in 1911, Hiroyuki Tajima graduated from Nihon University in 1932. He continued his studies at Tokyo School of Fine Arts, graduating from the Western-style painting division in 1934. He also studied woodblock printing with Yoshio Nagase and fabric dyeing under Matsugoro Hirokawa during this time. Tajima made his first print in 1946 and joined Bijutsu Bunka Kyokai that same year. This organization was instrumental in the revitalization of abstract printing and surrealist painting in the wake of World War II. Between 1950 and 1952, Hiroyuki Tajima took a break from printmaking to write short stories and poetry. He returned to printmaking in the 1960s, participating in international exhibitions and exploring unlikely materials and complex textures in his abstract prints.