WKM Gallery is pleased to announce In Pursuit of Totality: Paintings from 1950 to 1998, a retrospective exhibition showcasing key works by Japanese painter Yamada Masaaki (1929 - 2010) from Shane Akeroyd. This exhibition brings together paintings from Yamada’s three major series, Still Life, Work, and Color, tracing his evolution from contemplative still life paintings to rhythmic abstractions and, finally, to meditative color fields. Yamada’s practice is increasingly being recognized as a vital contribution to the discourse on post-war Japanese abstraction, and In Pursuit of Totality: Paintings from 1950 to 1998 offers a timely opportunity to reassess the work of a historically underacknowledged artist whose sustained formal inquiry pioneered advances in the language of modernism.

Spanning several decades of production in Tokyo following World War II, Yamada’s work is marked by a singular visual language grounded in line, color, and repetition. Yamada was deeply impacted by his experiences during the war, including three firebombing raids and the destruction of his home in Tokyo, and his practice can be understood as a sustained, lifelong attempt at grappling with the residual psychological scars of those years. His early Still Life series reflects a quiet contemplation on the ephemerality of life in the vein of vanitas, often featuring objects imbued with themes of transience or death. The flowers, fruits, vases, and various domestic objects that make up his still life paintings were largely rendered from memory, as if they were vessels for loss and longing. As the series progressed, the recognizable subjects of his paintings dissolved into increasingly deconstructed shapes that recurred across canvases, not as depictions of specific items or scenes, but as a distillation of their essence. As the boundaries between object and space collapsed further, Yamada’s foray into abstraction deepened, gradually giving way to rhythmic compositions.