FINE ARTS EXHIBITION: Hundertwasser & Hasegawa – Orient & Okzident

Dear Art lovers!

Gallery-Museum Lendava and Municipality of Lendava kindly invite you and your friends
to the opening of the exhibition

Hundertwasser & Hasegawa:
Orient & Okzident
(East and West),

which will be on Friday, 8 March 2019, at 7 pm on the Lendava castle.

Opening speecehes:
dr. Mihael Kasaš, Mayor of the Municipality of Lendava,
mag. Norbert Hack, Deputy Ambassador of the Republic of Austria,
Keiko Furuta, Deputy Ambassador of Japan and
art historian Atilla Pisnjak.

The exhibition will be opened by Silvester Gaberšček, Head of the Department for Immovable Cultural Heritage at the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

Music program:
Urban Kurbos, clarinet and Aleksander Živko, piano

The exhibition will be on display until 1 September 2019.

GRAPHICS OF THE INVITATION

East and West
Two worlds meeting in Lendava

The exhibition is a compilation of works from Austria’s Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000), and Japan’s Shoichi Hasegawa (1929-), that seeks to illustrate the meeting of two worlds.

Hundertwasser, also famous as an architect, traveled to the Japanese capital in 1961, where the Tokyo Gallery presented his works with great success. Here the paths of the two artists cross, as Hasegawa himself had a look at his colleague’s exhibition. Subsequently, the Japanese artist left his home for Paris to become better acquainted with the Western world, while Hundertwasser was fascinated by Eastern philosophies and arts. “He was the first European who could employ Japanese wood carving masters.”

Predominantly featured in the exhibition are colorful graphics: lithography, serigraphy, woodcuts, complemented by watercolors and ceramics, and illustrate the effects of the two worlds, the East and the West: their parallels and differences. It does this from two perspectives, since the peculiarities of these worlds are conveyed through the experiences of a “native” and an “alien” eye.

The exhibition, Orient & Okzident, presenting the works of the two artists, comes from the private collection of Richard H. Mayer.

Orient & Okzident:
An East-West Meeting in Lendava

The exhibition, Orient & Okzident, presenting the works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Shoichi Hasegawa, features a meeting between two worlds – the East and the West. Consisting mostly of prints, the exhibition goes beyond mere artistic representation, for it reflects the cultural and social characteristics of both spheres. Aside from drawing attention to their differences, Orient & Okzident also seeks to trace interactions and similarities between the East and the West. Indeed, the exhibition can be interpreted on several levels: we can examine the specific peculiarities of the two worlds separately (again: not only the artistic aspects!), or their dissimilarities and parallels, or – and this is really important – we can gain a thorough insight into the art and life of Hundertwasser and Hasegawa.

The complexity of the Orient & Okzident exhibition is further highlighted by the fact that the “complicated systems” of the two worlds can be approached from at least two perspectives. Austrian-born Friedensreich Hundertwasser had many ties to Japan, which was Shoichi Hasegawa’s birthplace and homeland before he moved to Europe, more specifically to Paris. Thus, the art and culture of Japan reverberates not only in the creations of “indigenous” Hasegawa, but also in the eyes and works of a European who had had the chance to have been there. And the opposite is true as well: attributes of European art present themselves in Hundertwasser’s pieces, but we also gain insight into how Hasegawa sees and lives in the West. The title of this exhibition, in any case, can be attributed to the fact that, in this context, Orient undoubtedly involves Japan, even though Orient is a much broader notion, because to Europeans, it includes everything located east of the Mediterranean Sea, and for a long time it referred to the Islamic world rather than the Far East. In contrast, the Occident / West is more difficult to define and limit, and the exhibited works represent not simply one country, but a more composite cultural concept.

The Lendava exhibition forms a complex and complicated encounter of two worlds, the East and the West, as well as that of two artists. Multi-threaded systems and a mass of information can readily accommodate any visitor who is open to novelties and the unfamiliar, just as were Hundertwasser and Hasegawa.

PHOTOS: Exhibition opening

Photo: Sandi Baumgartner