TOKYO -- In art and design, "less is more." So said the renowned German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of Europe's famed Bauhaus school in the 1930s, in a classic dictum expressing modernism's reverence for stripped-down, serenely minimalist forms in buildings, objects, paintings and just about everything else.
The late Keiichi Tanaami, who was born in 1936 and died in August at the age of 88, was a prolific Japanese artist who apparently never received Mies' influential message. Indeed, even if such a notion ever passed through his creative headspace, it is likely that he would not have wrestled with it for long. That is because Tanaami was a modernist purist's unfathomable opposite -- a maximalist whose artistic production included everything from drawings and prints to collages, paintings, animated films and even large-scale inflatable sculptures.
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