Atsuko & Kunihiko Kato

"Praise of the earth" - Japanese Art

01.12.1998 - 31.01.1999

For more than 22 years the artist couple Atsuko and Kunihiko Kato has been living in Germany, more exactly in Fuerth near Nuremberg, and has become familiar with European culture. Their art creates a bridge between East and West, between reality and vision, between man and nature. Nature is the great theme of their inspiration, an "infinite creative source" they call it. For Atsuko Kato, nature as motif is the medium to the inner world of the being. "Even the contradiction between real and visionary world is unified", says Atsuko Kato who with great dedication is growing plants herself and often incorporates them, mainly ginkgos, into her artisitic work. The exactness and love of detail with which she reproduces her nature visions in a time when particularly wide brush strokes are the order of the day, is attributable not only to her Japanese inheritance.   The techniques of oil painting and lithography (which she masters to perfection) do not have their origin in the Far-Eastern tradition. Atsuko Kato's drawing teacher greatly admired Albrecht Duerer, her Professor of Art had studied in Germany, and so to continue her art studies which she had begun in Japan she chose Duerer's town, Nuremberg. For Atsuko Kato the beauty of untouched nature contrasts sharply with the world manipulated by man. For overcoming dissonance and unifying contradictions, Atsuko has found a striking symbol: the ginkgo tree, or more specifically the split ginkgo leaf which appears in many of her work in a great number of variations. The ginkgo, a plant which is a phenomenon itself with numerous special features and the subject of innumerable Asiatic myths, stands for friendship, love and hope. It is evident from the fact that this resistant plant has survived the concentrated destructive fury of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ginkgo thus becomes the bringer of hope; when men can begin to settle the feuds among them there is an opportunity, according to the artist's thesis, for a further step, the reunification with nature. The sculputures of Kunihiko Kato appear at a first glance much more abstract than the pictures of Atsuko Kato. Yet they are all inspired by nature, "praise of the earth" of a different kind which allows the viewer to recognise how much he has become blind to the miracles surrounding him. Not only are there expansive panoramas here, but individual forms, partly existing since primeval times, from the inexhaustible reservoir of the world of plants and animals, in particular marine animals. Kunihiko Kato describes his work as "biocentric". By releasing his natural forms from their surroundings, artistically modifying and stylising them, he gives them a completely new and secretive existence. "Living beings" is the name for all his creations, and each one of them demonstrates awe before life in all its forms, unobstrusively inviting us to pause a while and to pay attention.

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