Ray Yoshida
[b. 1930; Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii]
acrylic on canvas
59 1/2 by 83 1/2 inches
ISM/IAC Partners in Purchase Program
Collection of the Illinois State Museum
Because of his flat, highly stylized manner of painting Yoshida has most often been associated with Chicago’s Imagist movement of the 1970s. Inactive Event is characteristic of a group of large paintings executed late in that decade in which oversized geometric, almost architectural, forms float within a textured ground of analogous color. Yoshida activates a subtle tension among these primarily rectilinear forms by placing the third form from the left just slightly off-vertical.