Gene Gallery is pleased to announce that it will be exhibiting a solo exhibition with the same name by Yoshio Sekine (1922-1989). Yoshio Sekine was born in Wakayama,Japan,1922. He met the influential painter Jiro Yoshihara(1905-1972) through the Jiyu Bijutsu Kyoukai (Free Artists’ Association) and was involved in the founding of the avant-garde Gutai group in 1954. This exhibition presents the most distinctive and influential series of Abacus works in Sekine’s art career, and interprets the artistic spirit of Gutai from a unique micro perspective.

For more than 25 years, since the early 1960s, Sekine has continued to create works depicting such themes as “abacus,” “gate,” “carriage,” and “Mount Fuji.” Among them, the abacus, as a specific depiction object and theme, appears repeatedly in artists’ paintings. Although these works still belong to the category of figurative painting, the object they depict, “abacus”, has been deliberately stripped of the shell of the object’s own image, thus reflecting the characteristics of some cultural symbols. “Abacus” has become a kind of image component and is reduced to a horizontal, vertical and slanted arrangement structure, and the space created by this structure has the metaphor of repetition and cycle. In it, the audience is invited to find themselves on the boundary between illusion and concretization.

As a representative tool of traditional monetary calculation, the abacus was gradually replaced by electronic calculation during the period of economic growth in Japan. The functional nature contained in it, recorded by Sekine’s brush, has become both a microcosm of Social change in Japan and a joke about modern people living in an electronic world — are we virtual or real in the digital age?