Sezon Museum of Modern Art holds approximately fifty works by Keiji Usami, ranging from early paintings such as Building / Anti-Building / Meguri 8 and Prelude to Abstraction (1) 10 (c.1958–1960) to the late work Brake / Deluge (2011). In 1992, the Museum organized Keiji Usami Retrospective: Reconstructing the World, the artist’s first retrospective exhibition.
The first work by Usami to enter the Museum’s collection was Ghost Plan No. 1 (1969). Beginning in 1965, four human silhouettes derived from photographs of the Watts riots in Los Angeles published in Life magazine—a staggering figure, a crouching figure, a running figure, and a stone-throwing figure—started to appear in his work. Stripped of individual identity and reduced to signs, these figures were pinned to walls in the artist’s daily environment, allowing Usami to observe and record how they interacted and collided with surrounding landscapes and changing light, almost as extensions of himself.
As networks of diagonal lines and color gradations spread across the picture plane, these silhouettes came to “interpenetrate” the city, shifting from signs toward forms. Even as the backgrounds became increasingly abstract, the human figures retained the shape of actual bodies. This persistent presence of the human form is one of the defining characteristics of Usami’s work, preventing it from becoming wholly abstract.