George Miyasaki

Art Brokerage: George Miyasaki American Artist: b. 1935-2013. George Miyasaki was a painter and printmaker active in the San Francisco Bay Area arts scene during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Although primarily known for his adeptly and lushly colored Abstract Expressionist work, Miyasaki's contributions to the movement were largely ignored during his lifetime due to his race. Until recently, many critics, including Clement Greenberg, denied the aesthetic and philosophic influence of East Asian calligraphy and Zen Buddhism on Abstract Expressionism, instead depicting it as the product of exclusively Western traditions. Miyasaki gained acclaim as a brilliant colorist in the late 1950s and early 60s for his Abstract Expressionist paintings and prints. Unlike his counterparts of the New York School, Miyasaki was concerned with the spontaneity and randomness of natural creation rather than expressing his own inner psychology. He often drew inspiration from the local landscape, referring to California and the American West in his titles. In the mid-1960s, Miyasaki departed from gestural abstraction and experimented with Pop Art collages before pursuing systematized studies of color and hard-edged shapes in the 1970s, developing his own abstract language that reduced complex organic forms into simple geometric ones. In 1967, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held Arts of San Francisco: George Miyasaki, a solo exhibition of his work. In 1980, he participated in the 14th International Biennial for Graphic Art in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. Listings wanted.