日本人写真家、北代省三の作品集。2015年にタカ・イシイギャラリー ニューヨークで開催された展覧会「Forms of Experiment & Imagination」に伴い刊行された。川崎市岡本太郎美術館主任学芸員の佐藤玲子、キュレーターでありギャラリストの藤井孝行によるテキストを収録。（英語）

Text by Reiko Sato, Takayuki Fujii (English)

Official Press Release:

Taka Ishii Gallery New York is pleased to present “Forms of Experiment and Imagination”, the first solo exhibition to be held in the United States of Shozo Kitadai(1921–2001). On view are thirteen rare vintage photographs from the “Form” Series, 1956–1960’s, and two wire sculptures dating from the1980s. A core member of the avant-garde collaborative Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) founded in Tokyo immediately after World War II, Kitadai was a noted Japanese photographer, painter and sculptor. Composed of fourteen visual artists―performers, choreographers, light designers, sound engineers and composers―Jikken Kōbō is well known for its inter-media and cross-disciplinary works and notable role in fostering the rebirth of the Japanese cultural avant-garde. These rarely exhibited works exemplify Kitadai’s acute sense of aesthetics and experimental thought and illuminate his singular philosophy on art, form and avant – garde activities. The elegantly executed photographs and sculptures reveal his unique vantage point and rather unorthodox approach.
Evocative of a bold experimentation with form, the photographs enlist the landscape of a changing post-war Tokyo and its architecture in the seminal period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when Japan began its transformation from a war devastated country to a modern society, replete with social convulsions, intense economic shifts and changing view points. Kitadai used the camera to examine and question abstract form through details he chose to frame and extract from the world around him. His acute interest in technology, engineering and structures became the subject and motifs of his experimentation using photography. Also on view are two kinetic sculptures dating from 1980s, representative of the abstract sculptural form that he is well known for. As art critic Yusuke Nakahara wrote in her 2003 catalogue for his solo exhibition at the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, in Kawasaki, Japan, the mobile sculptures were the expression of his ongoing interest in the theory of movement and form, defying the normative and traditional categories of art and expanding the limitations between form and movement. This exhibition is accompanied with a limited edition gallery publication, Shozo Kitadai, Forms of Experiment and Imagination, published by Taka Ishii Gallery – New York, 2015. Essays by Reiko Sato, chief curator of the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki, and Takayuki Fujii.