Robert Yasuda

Robert Yasuda (born 1940) is an American abstract painter, most known for contemplative, atmospheric works that straddle painting, sculpture and architecture. He 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. Since the 1990s, he has focused on paintings that disrupt conventional formats using hand-carved wood panels and custom framing elements, upon which he builds multi-layered iridescent surfaces that respond dynamically to shifting conditions of light, time and vantage. Reviewing this later work, ARTnews critic Barbara MacAdam described Yasuda as a "romantic minimalist" whose paintings present an intangible, fleeting reality that is nonetheless referential, showing his roots in their construction, shifting tones and titles.

Yasuda has exhibited internationally, including shows at the Museo di Palazzo Grimini (Venice Biennale), Galerie Bischofberger, Betty Parsons Gallery, The Clocktower, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others. His 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. He lives and works in New York City and Sugarloaf Key, Florida with his wife, artist Judith Murray.

Robert Masao Yasuda was born in Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii in 1940. He 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. In 1958, he moved to New York City to study art at the Pratt Institute, earning BFA and MFA degrees and immersing himself in the work of the New York School artists. In the early 1960s, he rented a vacant cafeteria on Long Island for use as a studio and began painting multi-image abstract oil paintings on canvas. These early paintings were exhibited in solo shows at Galerie Bischofberger (Zurich and St. Moritz) in 1968 and 1969.

In the early 1970s, Yasuda converted a space in SoHo into a live-work studio and began exploring themes of perception and light in minimal paintings that increasingly took on a sculptural and architectural presence. This work evolved into large-scale wall-painting installations, the first of which he mounted at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1975; Over the next decade, he created site-specific installations determined by the venue architecture at The Clocktower Gallery, MoMA PS1, Corcoran Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage.

Later in his career, he turned to hand-crafted multi-panel paintings in solo exhibitions at Koplin Gallery in Los Angeles (1982–8), Elizabeth Harris Gallery (New York, 1993–06), Sundaram Tagore Gallery (New York and Singapore, 2010, 2014), and David Lusk Gallery (Memphis, 2000–19), among others. He has also appeared in group shows at the McNay Art Museum, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu.

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. Throughout his career, he has defied conventional painting boundaries, introducing new spatial contexts and idiosyncratic sculptural, architectural and framing elements, frequently in multi-panel works; these elements include bowed and carved wooden panels and forms, rounded or upturned corners, and incomplete frames suggesting lintel, gate or bridge forms, among others. He 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. Over time, he has moved beyond formal minimalism toward more subjective and sensual work that seeks to visually convey moments of perception and insight, along with allusions to nature and his heritage, including impressions of Hawaii and Florida and his childhood teachings in Buddhism.

Yasuda's early work consisted of multi-panel, often unconventionally shaped paintings and large-scale wall painting installations. His wall paintings angled off existing walls or structures in forward tilts to create new, compressed and angular spaces, distinguishing themselves as objects rather than murals. He 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. Critic John Perreault wrote that the installations demonstrated "abstract art's potential for spiritual power," while New York Magazine's Thomas Hess described the work as "an art of delicacies" developed at an architectural scale.

Yasuda's installation for PS1's inaugural exhibition "Rooms" (1976) occupied two connecting rooms. In one room, he displayed a large, tilted painting inscribed with a triangle and a subtle, mirrored double above it, which was arranged to be visible through the door to the adjoining room; in the other, two tilted paintings almost as large as the original walls featured diagonals that reflected the other room's painting. His installation at The Clocktower, Double Oblique (1977), employed four back-to-back panels in a W-formation, each divided by a diagonal running between opposite corners, which led the eye inward, outward, up or down depending on vantage point and compressed or expanded the space. In 1979, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago invited Yasuda (and four others, including Robert Ryman and Lucio Pozzi) to create large, individual temporary visual environments directly on the museum's principal exhibition walls.