Tadashi Asoma Paintings

Tadashi Asoma was a Japanese-American painter. Born in Japan in 1923, his career began when, in 1958, the Japanese government awarded him a scholarship to study painting in Paris. After Paris, Asoma visited the United States and became fascinated with the current American style of painting. He eventually moved to New York, near the East Village, where he studied and worked for three years. Asoma did return to Japan for a period of time, however, he moved to New York permanently in 1961 and stayed in the region until his passing in 2017. This early work by Asoma displays the American influence that so enamored him when he first visited the United States. Rendered in flat and discrete sections of bold color, the impressive composition bears an interesting relation to the work of Pop artist Tom Wesselmann. Much like Wesselmann’s work, Asoma builds his image with applications of bold and flat color, often isolating and highlighting sections of the composition, bringing the viewer’s eye to these discrete sections. In this work, a green bed...