ADAA THE ART SHOW 2021: Robert Kobayashi

3 - 7 November 2021

Robert Kobayashi
The ADAA Art Show
Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of the Estate of Robert Kobayashi (1925-2015). To mark the occasion, the Gallery will present a selection of Kobayashi's work at the 2021 ADAA Art Show, on view 3 November 2021 through 7 November 2021 at the Park Avenue Armory, NYC.
Robert Kobayashi, Vermont Window, 1989
Robert Kobayashi "was one of New York’s great outlier artists. He had a brief period as an abstract expressionist, but in the early 1960s devised his own folk-artist version of pointillist painting, packing the signature dots so close together that his textured images seemed solid… In the 1970s, Mr. Kobayashi made this solidity real by nailing little brush-stroke size pieces of cutout tin to wood, either flat or carved in the round. Animated by swarms of tiny dots — the nailheads — these surfaces are endlessly engaging: At once armored and delicate, fierce and charming, they record the forming process with unusual clarity."

— Roberta Smith, New York Times
Robert Kobayashi, Fleur de Lis #1, 1998

Robert Kobayashi served in the United States Army from 1944 to 1946 during WWII, winning four medal citations as a member of the 778th Tank Battalion. Despite this service, Kobayashi’s status as a Japanese American prevented him from travelling home to his native Hawaii on leave. Instead of risking internment by his own country, Kobayashi chose to make a short but fateful journey North, where he fell into the Art Institute of Chicago and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884. This chance encounter with pointillism would plant the seed for the artist’s future practice.

After the war, Kobayashi returned to Honolulu, where he entered the School of Art at the suggestion of his sister, Fumiko. Following local success as an abstract painter, Kobayashi moved to New York in 1949, arriving at a defining moment in the New York art world. He participated in exhibitions at artist-run galleries like Brata Gallery—one of few to show artists of color— Camino Galleries, and with the dealer Sam Koontz. In the decades that followed, Kobayashi sought to differentiate himself from his abstract expressionist peers by pursuing materials and techniques that more closely aligned with his personal interests and his early love of Georges Seurat.

In 1977, Kobayashi bought a building with his wife, Kate Keller Kobayashi, on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. Taking over an existing butcher shop, the ground floor assumed various guises, ultimately settling into its role as a gallery operating under the moniker, Moe’s Meat Market. Avoiding commercial art settings, Kobayashi preferred to present his pieces at Moe’s, and by 2009, the space served exclusively to exhibit his own work. A local landmark, the artist engaged passersby with rotating window displays and innovative presentations of his art, placing work directly on the floor or hanging it from the shop’s original meat hooks. The gallery kept limited public hours dictated by whim rather than commerce.
Kobayashi drew his energy and materials from the streets of Little Italy, developing a unique style of mixed media dubbed by writer Michael Florescu, clouage, taken from the French verb meaning “to nail.” Using found metals and detritus, he assembled two and three-dimensional works from discarded ceiling tin as well as beer and Cafe Bustelo cans. The selection of Robert Kobayashi’s work in The 2021 ADAA Art Show surveys the artist’s best-known subjects—cozy geometric interiors that record Kobayashi’s time in Paris and New York, and a sculpture of Fumiko, whose delicately painted floral sweater exhibits Kobayashi’s unique ability to imbue metal with softness and warmth. The show is anchored by three neo-pointillist paintings from the 1980s, Vermont Window, Fleur de Lis #1, and String Beans, to highlight a crucial evolution in Kobayashi’s practice—the transition from painting to clouage.

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Robert Kobayashi, Still Life in Corner, 2012
Robert Kobayashi, Rue des St. Peres, 1950, 2007
Robert Kobayashi, Rue Des St. Peres, 1950 (Detail), 2007

Rue Des St. Peres, 1950
In the 1950's, Kobayashi's sister Fumiko took a position as Assistant to the American Ambassador to France. With her encouragement, Kobayashi traveled to Paris to continue his studies, living at a hostel for artists, Hotel de l'Académie on the Rue des St. Peres. Ideally situated within walking distance of both the Musee d’Orsay and the Louvre, the young artist was introduced to the work of many French as well as Japanese artists. The influence of Henri Mattise, Cezanne, and the Impressionists can be seen in Rue Des St. Peres, 1950.

Taking artistic license, the fleur de lis pattern that peppers the hotel's wallcovering is put on equal footing with the unpretentious table setting at the center of Rue des St. Peres, 1950. Ground and foreground dissolve into an all over patterning and uniformity. The seemingly haphazard placement of the pitcher, bottle and cup set within this highly stylized composition illustrates Kobayashi's knack for sprezzatura—the casual geometry of the objects belying the laborious nature of their rendering.
Robert Kobayashi, Glass Cup, 1998
Robert Kobayashi, Glass Cup (Detail), 1998

Glass Cup
Parallel hatches of gradient tin form the illusion of three-dimensionality in Kobayashi’s Glass Cup. The tessellated surfaces of his green apples bring to mind the brushwork found in Cezanne's Still life with Apples, 1894. Close examination of Cezanne’s paint handling and Kobayashi’s tin marquetry allows the viewer to pull back the curtain, revealing the magic behind the artists' sleight of hand.
Robert Kobayashi, Black Nude, 1999
ROBERT KOBAYASHI, BLACK NUDE (DETAIL), 1999

Black Nude
In the late 1990’s, Robert Kobayashi embarked on a series of clouage featuring nudes in repose. Black Nude is one such work. Here the central subject reclines comfortably, her gaze directed toward an interior horizon. Parallel strips of radiant blue tin create the illusion of floorboards and striped wallpaper, while contrasting bone-hued sections trace the gentle slope of the body.

In contrast to works in which the nailheads appear numerous and constellation-like, the artist here employs just enough brads to secure the painted tin composing Black Nude. In doing so, Kobayashi centers the viewer's attention on the crinkles, dents, seams, and overall physicality of the recycled tin.

The material emphasis is further reinforced by the work’s armoured frame, itself a series of parallel strips orientated along the slope of the reclining figure. Black Nude is a significant example of Robert Kobayashi’s ability to create surfaces that exist simultaneously as image and object—reminding us of the materials' past life, covering the walls and ceilings of the restaurants and shops of old New York.
"We cannot help observing that the patterns in which the nails have been hammered always follow the contours of the independently expressive shapes of the tin patches. The nailheads are thus seen as primarily functional. Yet each one (and its individual placement in space and its relationship to every other nailhead) is, mysteriously, more than purely funcional, more than its polarity, merely decorative. While logically they are vital to secure the tin patches, they also create their own abstract pattern. It is as though the pattern of nailheads carrys a cryptic message that must be deciphered...Kobayashi's nailhead patterns are closer, surely, to the felicitous correspondences of nature."

—Michael Florescu
Robert Kobayashi, Rock on Ernsthausen's Farm, 2009
ROBERT KOBAYASHI, ROCK ON ERNSTHAUSEN'S FARM (Detail), 2009

Rock on Ernsthausen's Farm
Kobayashi's Rock on Ernstausen’s Farm is part of a meditative series dating from 2001 to 2009, centered on the American landscape. Here function follows form as each strip of tin is used to shape a single blade of grass. Repeated a thousand times, the blades multiply to form densely shimmering fields, filling part or all of the picture plane, often wrapping around the edges of the frame.

Rock on Ernsthausen’s Farm is based on a property belonging to Kate Keller Kobayashi's family. According to Kate, although much of the series was titled after places in her native Ohio, the work was more likely inspired by memories of the artist's homeland, Hawaii, and the fields of sugar cane that covered the hills outside of Honolulu.
Robert Kobayashi, String Beans, 1983
ROBERT KOBAYASHI, STRING BEANS (DETAIL), 1983

String Beans
String Beans is the earliest example of Robert Kobayashi's work included in our ADAA presentation. Striking in its simplicity, String Beans introduces several key throughlines emblematic of the artist's practice. Initially we are mesmerized by the densely packed dots, thousands upon thousands, creating a gentle ocular flicker. Further consideration reveals Kobayashi's legendarily playful, dry sense of humor. Resting in the aesthetic oasis between surreal landscape and color-blindness test, String Beans challenges and delights in the absence of its titular vegetable — to paraphrase, sometimes a string bean is not a string bean, sometimes it's an eggplant.
ROBERT KOBAYASHI was born in 1925 in Honolulu, HI. After serving in the military during World War II, he was encouraged to pursue a career as an artist by his sister, attending both the Honolulu Academy of Art and the Brooklyn Museum School of Art. In 1988, Kobayashi had his first major solo exhibition, Tattooed Angel: Paintings and Sculpture by Robert Kobayashi, at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, NY. Exhibitions since that time include Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NYC; Hawaii to New York, Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center, Honolulu, HI; and Robert Kobayashi: Moonflowers, New York University Broadway Windows, NYC. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; and the Nassau Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY, among others. He died in his hometown of Honolulu in 2015.
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