Untitled No. 2

Arakawa Shûsaku was a painter, poet, filmmaker, and inventor whose work explores a range of philosophical issues that touch on perception, the mind-body connection, individual experience, visual and verbal ambiguity, architec- ture, and immortality. Viewing painting as an experimental exercise, Arakawa believed that a canvas is a place “to trap questions, areas, operations, [and] answers” and “make them visible by combining two or more languages.” Untitled No. 2 is an example of his early paintings, which are characterized by diagrammatic floor plans and geometric grids with arrows, dotted lines, paint drips, collaged elements, and stenciled letters. The work’s pictorial plane is fractured, as standard spatial signifiers describing the rooms of a house are complicated with personal terms such as “mother” and a tear in the canvas that reveals the underlying structure.