Large Gallery
March 19-22nd
11am – 5pm daily
The MAC is pleased to welcome Masami Teraoka to the gallery for A Tweak Week, a program directed toward educating audiences in the practices involved in creating large scale paintings.
A Tweak Week offers patrons the opportunity to witness Teraoka in the process of manipulating and editing his paintings as would be done in the artists’ own studio. Audiences are encouraged to speak openly and interact with the artist while he is painting.
The exhibition Masami Teraoka: Inversion of the Sacred/ The Cloisters Last Supper – Triptych Series will be on view March 15 – May 3, 2014.
Masami Teraoka was born in 1936 in Onomichi, Hiroshima-ken, Japan. He graduated in 1959 with a B.A. in aesthetics from Kwansei Gakuin University, and continued his education to receive a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1968. Integrating reality with fantasy, humor with commentary, and history with the present became his working challenge. His early paintings are often focused on the clash of his two cultures- East and West. Series such as McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan and 31 Flavors Invading Japan characterize some themes in his work. In the 1980’s, Teraoka’s watercolors became large scale in an effort to depict the subject of AIDS. Since the late 1990’s, he has been producing large-scale narrative work addressing social and political issues, especially the sexual abuse of children by priests. His recent large-scale paintings are inspired by Renaissance painting but continue the narrative quality and visual conventions of Japanese woodblock prints.
Teraoka has been the subject of more than 70 solo exhibitions, many of which have traveled extensively, including those organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu in 1988, and the Yale University Art Gallery in 1998. In 1996 he was featured in a solo exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, The Smithsonian Institution and in 1997 at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. His work can also be seen in more than 50 public collections worldwide, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia, and the Gallery of Modern Art in Scotland. Teraoka is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles and Art Amalgamated Gallery in New York.