Keiichi Tanaami, whose pop-inspired work explored traumas of war and illness, died aged 88, his gallery Nanzuka announced.
Born in 1936 to a textile wholesaler in Tokyo, Tanaami lived through the Second World War and witnessed its brutality during his childhood, when tens of thousands of civilians were killed during the Great Tokyo Air Raid in 1945. Some of the scenes like firebombs, searchlights and wardrobes would later appear in his densely populated paintings.
During his early life, Tanaami frequented the studio of postwar cartoonist Kazushi Hara, exploring manga and graphic novels, and studied at Musashino Art University in 1957. After graduating he worked at an advertising agency before becoming an independent illustrator while exploring video art and being actively involved in the Neo-Dada movement.
In 1967 Tanaami came across the work of Andy Warhol in New York and became heavily influenced by Warhol’s references to the visual language of advertisement. In the 1970s, alongisde psychedelic paintings and prints that incorporated US pop icons and anti-war messages, he designed album covers for legendary bands like The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane and served as the first art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy.
Tanaami passed two days after the opening of his current retrospective Keiichi Tanaami: Adventures in Memory at Tokyo’s National Art Center, on view through 11 November. His first American survey will be on view in December at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami.
In 2014, Tanaami produced an original comic strip for ArtReview Asia, which starts from “a big spider, ghastly and smiling above my head when I was recovering in bed from catarrh of the colon”, the artist told Paul Gravett.
