Aus den sieben Tagen
Kazuya Sakai
(K. Stockhausen)
Aus den sieben Tagen refers to the eponymous piece of music by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), involving 15 poetic instructions to be performed freely. The title alludes to the seven days of the week and the creation of the world in the Judeo-Christian narrative.
The piece is part of a series of polyptychs that Sakai developed, in varying formats, throughout the 1970s. They are grounded in a system of formal rules for deploying geometric and chromatic elements, practically bands of colors and concentric circles, structured according to jazz and experimental musical compositions.
Sakai intuitively arranges 15 concentric circles across the plane of the painting, corresponding to the German composer’s fifteen instructions, which offer Sakai a kind of pictorial score. The hard-edged style is characteristic of the era’s industrial orientation toward geometrism: a school that treats the pictorial plane as a formal unit in which brushsrtoke and color are juxtaposed with geometric masses.
KAZUYA SAKAI (1927–2001)
Aus den sieben Tagen (K. Stockhausen), 1976
From the Seven Days (K. Stockhausen)
Diptych. Acrylic on canvas
Acquisition, 2006
