Robert Yasuda

Robert Yasuda (born 1940) is an American abstract painter, most known for contemplative, atmospheric works that straddle painting, sculpture and architecture. He first attracted wide attention in the 1970s for large wall works merging painting and installation art, mounted at MoMA PS1, the Corcoran Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Since the 1990s, he has focused on paintings that disrupt conventional formats using hand-carved wood panels and custom framing elements, upon which he builds multi-layered iridescent surfaces that respond dynamically to shifting conditions of light, time and vantage. Reviewing this later work, ARTnews critic Barbara MacAdam described Yasuda as a "romantic minimalist" whose paintings present an intangible, fleeting reality that is nonetheless referential, showing his roots in their construction, shifting tones and titles. Robert Yasuda, Harmony, acrylic polymer on fabric on wood, 80" x 62", 2005.

Yasuda has exhibited internationally, including shows at the Museo di Palazzo Grimini (Venice Biennale), Galerie Bischofberger, Betty Parsons Gallery, The Clocktower, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others. His art belongs to the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress and New York Public Library, among others, and he has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, and John Hay Whitney Foundation.

Later in his career, he turned to hand-crafted multi-panel paintings in solo exhibitions at Koplin Gallery in Los Angeles (1982–8), Elizabeth Harris Gallery (New York, 1993–06), Sundaram Tagore Gallery (New York and Singapore, 2010, 2014), and David Lusk Gallery (Memphis, 2000–19), among others. In one room, he displayed a large, tilted painting inscribed with a triangle and a subtle, mirrored double above it, which was arranged to be visible through the door to the adjoining room; in the other, two tilted paintings almost as large as the original walls featured diagonals that reflected the other room's painting. His installation at The Clocktower, Double Oblique (1977), employed four back-to-back panels in a W-formation, each divided by a diagonal running between opposite corners, which led the eye inward, outward, up or down depending on vantage point and compressed or expanded the space.

Yasuda's solo exhibitions of this time often combined installation and individual works. Arts Magazine described his 1977 Parsons Gallery exhibition as a "tour de force statement" of understated purity on the possibilities of transforming space, light and color. and the Thomas Babeor, Betty Parsons, Marianne Deson, Hoshour, and Koplin

Robert Yasuda, Footprint, acrylic polymer on fabric on wood, 49" x 32", 1998.

Later work In two exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery (1993, 1996), Yasuda presented large abstractions combining rectangular wood panels placed side-by-side or stacked, which New York Times critic Pepe Karmel compared to pairs and quartets of monochrome canvases by Brice Marden. Critics noted in these paintings a quiet optical effect of inner light, achieved through Yasuda's alternating layers of translucent color and scrim-like, stretched fabric, the tight weave adding a grid-like formality over autumnal and spring-like shades of gray, green, tan, blue and grey. In the middle of the decade, he increasingly turned to interference paints yielding more intense, silvery tones that shift according to vantage point and light source and were compared to the pearlescence of interior abalone shells or the iridescence of butterflies and exotic fish. The latter show also featured imposing, near-monochrome panels stacked or abutted to one another, as in Ancestor (2009), a seven-foot, mint green work consisting of two pillar-like shapes; ARTnews critic Doug McClemont described such works as confident but unassuming "pearly gateways" that together created a mysterious "cathedral atmosphere."

Public collections and awards Yasuda's work belongs to the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Bass Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, State Foundation for the Arts (Honolulu), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum, and several higher learning institutions. He has been recognized with two American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Awards (2016 and 2008) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1981) and John Hay Whitney Foundation (1962).