The first comprehensive English-language monograph on Keiichi Tanaami’s kaleidoscopic oeuvre, which merges Japanese postwar culture
and American-style comics with a genre-defining artistic output.
Artist, illustrator, graphic designer, filmmaker, and art director, Keiichi Tanaami is best known for his psychedelic creations that reach to
the farthest corners of the mind.
Since the 1960s, he has been composing works on paper, magazine covers, and phantasmagoric large-scale paintings as a response to
his traumatic experience of living through the United States’ atomic attack on Japan during World War II. He’s since made a mark on the world,
exhibiting across the globe. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Yokohama Museum of Art,
M+, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, among others.
Tanaami’s work is marked by an unexpectedly harmonic blend of eroticism, surrealism, psychedelia, and American comic art, combined with
pointed discourse on politics, consumerism, and pop culture. Al
though he has been memorialized in print form within a number of smaller, themed publications, this book is the first English-language artist
retrospective, a long-awaited and highly anticipated volume.
This exceptional publication, printed on multiple papers, is divided into five modules,
each opened by a background introduction to the artist's key themes—
Eros, Underground, Pop, Tradition, and Landscape
—offering a new, exhilarating lens through which to see the legendary artist’s oeuvre.
hardcover
256 pages
248 x 318 mm
color
2024
ISBN: 9780847899661
published by RIZZOLI
Founded in Tokyo in 2010, twelvebooks is a distributor specializing in art books.
As the exclusive Japanese representative for selected international publishers, twelvebooks manages the distribution
and promotion of their publications with a vision of making art books more widely accessible.
twelvebooks is also involved in various art book initiatives, including organizing the TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR.
In November 2024, twelvebooks opened SKWAT/twelvebooks in Nishikameari, Katsushika, a space that offers public access to its storage warehouse.