Untitled, 1980 – Keizo Morishita

At the beginning of the 1960s, Morishita had direct contact with the Milanese avant-garde art scene, still linked to Spatialism. His works are characterized by dreamlike, fairy-tale geometrizations that are increasingly accentuated as the years pass, in contrast to the softer taste widespread in those years by poor and informal art. On the one hand, all this refers to the need for order and rigour typical of Japanese culture (and often Morishita’s geometries are also evocative of Japanese views and landscapes), on the other it seems to derive from the impact on the artist of a certain Western culture, especially Max Ernst, Paul Klee and surrealism. In addition to being a painter, he was also an appreciated ceramist, having among other things created abstract-style vases and panels for the Studio Ernan factories in Albisola Superiore and San Giorgio di Albissola Marina. Morishita’s first exhibition was held in Padua in 1967 at the Galleria La Chiocciola. The anthology considered the most representative was held at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan in 2000. Among the posthumous exhibitions, we remember the one in 2006 at Studio F.22 in Palazzolo sull’Oglio, the gallery with which Morishita worked since the 1980s. Many art critics and curators have written about his work, including Franco Russoli, Roberto Sanesi, Emilio Tadini, Valerio Adami, Ottavio Missoni, Milena Milani, Carlo Franza, Luigi Carluccio, Renzo Margonari, Walter Schönenberger, Taijin Tendo, Keiko Asako, Tani Arata and Rolly Marchi.