RALPH IWAMOTO (1927-2013)
Available Work | Biography
Biography • Ralph Iwamoto (1927-2013)
Ralph Iwamoto came to New York in 1948 on the GI Bill to study at the Art Students League. Raised in Hawaii in a family of Japanese heritage, Iwamoto served in the US Army from 1946 to 1946 as a translator in Japan. Iwamoto first worked in organic forms, muted colors, and elements from traditional Japanese art. His first exhibition in New York was alongside Alfred Leslie and Louise Nevelson at Rugina Gallery in 1955. His work was included in the 1958 Whitney Museum of American Art Annual.
In 1957 Ralph Iwamoto learned the Museum of Modern Art was hiring additional guards for an upcoming Picasso exhibition. He got the job and was able to spend hours looking at Picasso’s work. While at MoMA, Iwamoto met fellow guards Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Ryman. He remained close friends with these Minimalists and worked on some of LeWitt’s early wall drawings.
Perhaps an influence of his MoMA friends, Ralph Iwamoto’s work became more geometric in the 1960s, including a series of shaped canvases from 1965 to 1968. In these works, the canvas edge is activated by arrangements of right-angled lines that move the viewer’s eye around the boundaries of the shaped canvas. He exhibited his shaped canvases at the Watson Gallery at Elmira College in 1968 and at Westbeth Gallery in 1973.
In the 1970s Ralph Iwamoto worked in minimal colors and permutations of compositions made up of octagons. Iwamoto’s first series he called QuarOctagon, four octagons set in a square. He moved on to a nine-octagon motif by 1974 and then increasingly complex arrangements starting in 1977 which continued for a decade in arrangements of black, white, and gray. Ralph Iwamoto made shaped canvases with contrasts of vibrant and subdued colors in the 1960s. Within the repeated octagon shape that he used from 1970 to 1987, Iwamoto worked in smaller series, starting with 15 x 15 inch studies to find his shapes within each quadrant’s octagon, defined by contrasts in color to distinguish the composition from other series, then up to 42 x 42 inches in the early 70s and up to 72 x 72 inches in the 3 x 3 octagons. He went on to use the octagon in increasingly complex arrangements, first in arrangements of 3 x 3 octagons in 1973 to grids of 8 x 8 QuarOctagons in 1980 to 17 x 21 arrangements of QuarOctagons in remarkably intricate hard edge geometries through the 1980s.
As a resident of Westbeth, Ralph Iwamoto had 5 exhibitions at the Westbeth Gallery. He was also a member and organizer for the American Abstract Artists group. In 1997 Iwamoto was included in Asian Traditions / Modern Expressions curated by Jeffrey Weschler for the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. He received a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002-2003. In 2004 he was included in Infinite Possibilities: Serial Imagery in 20th Century Drawings, Davis Museum and Cultural Center at the University of Michigan. Ralph Iwamoto’s work QuarOctagons Opus 7 Nightwatch, 1983, a 72 x 72 inch canvas, was included in the traveling exhibition LeWitt x2: Selections from the LeWitt Collection in 2007-2008. Another painting from Sol LeWitt’s collection, October Scrip A & B, 1974 is now part of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s collection. A 1977 painting was gifted to the Weatherspoon Art Museum as part of the Vogel Collection’s 50x50 gift in 2009.