1. Robert Yasuda first attracted wide attention in the 1970s for large wall works merging painting and installation art, mounted at MoMA PS1, the Corcoran Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
16 Facts About Robert Yasuda
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Robert Yasuda has exhibited internationally, including shows at the Museo di Palazzo Grimini, Galerie Bischofberger, Betty Parsons Gallery, The Clocktower, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others.
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Robert Yasuda's art belongs to the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress and New York Public Library, among others, and he has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, and John Hay Whitney Foundation.
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Robert Masao Yasuda was born in Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii in 1940.
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Robert Yasuda spent his childhood in rural Hawaii before attending boarding high school in Honolulu, where exposure to museums and concerts influenced his decision to be an artist.
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Robert Yasuda has appeared in group shows at the McNay Art Museum, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu.
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Robert Yasuda's paintings have been described as meditative investigations of ephemerality, perception and form that slowly reveal themselves through subtle marks, alterations and color shifts in relation to changing light and viewing conditions.
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Robert Yasuda employs a collage-like process that generally begins with acrylic-painted wooden structures, which he then wraps with sheer fabrics, layers again with translucent, fresco-like veils of pigment, and lastly, varnishes to create light-active surfaces.
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Robert Yasuda used diagonals, simple painted motifs, subtle lines and shifts in hue to both enhance and offset these physical and spatial sensations, exploring contradictions of perspective and perception.
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In 1979, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago invited Yasuda to create large, individual temporary visual environments directly on the museum's principal exhibition walls.
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In two exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Robert Yasuda presented large abstractions combining rectangular wood panels placed side-by-side or stacked, which New York Times critic Pepe Karmel compared to pairs and quartets of monochrome canvases by Brice Marden.
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Critics noted in these paintings a quiet optical effect of inner light, achieved through Robert Yasuda's alternating layers of translucent color and scrim-like, stretched fabric, the tight weave adding a grid-like formality over autumnal and spring-like shades of gray, green, tan, blue and grey.
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Robert Yasuda sometimes extended the sense of flickering color or back-illumination by painting the backs of his wall supports to create subtle reflected color and shadowing on walls surrounding the work.
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In later exhibitions, Robert Yasuda has expanded his range, re-introducing and reworking early motifs and developing new elements.
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Robert Yasuda's work belongs to the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Bass Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, State Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum, and several higher learning institutions.
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Robert Yasuda has been recognized with two American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and John Hay Whitney Foundation.