Takenobu Igarashi

Chronicling the career of award-winning Japanese graphic designer, industrial designer and fine artist Takenobu Igarashi - the subject of Takenobu Igarashi: Design and Fine art - is a fast-paced and colorful adventure through time, space and geography. Born in 1944, educated at Tokyo's Tama Art University (1968) and UCLA (1969), and professionally active in Japan and the United States, Igarashi won acclaim in the 1970s as a graphic designer for his axonometric alphabets, successfully extended his vision in the 1980s to include product design, and concluded 25 years of design activity in the 1990s by becoming a sculptor. As Igarashi explains, "My approach to design has always wavered between my wish to do something useful for society and my desire to create something beautiful with my own hands."Takenobu Igarashi: Design and Fine Art presents a richly illustrated and carefully documented survey of Igarashi's career and work in 304 pages, edited by Roshanak Keyghobadi and Angela Sabarese, art directed by B. Martin Pedersen and published by Graphis, Inc., that features over 400 striking images and a revealing text translated from the original Japanese by Naoko Metzler-Nakayama. Here readers will find such milestones of Igarashi's oeuvre as the three-dimensional calendar for New York's Museum of Modern Art, the poster produced for Expo '85: The International Exposition, Tsukuba, Japan, TI-1 flatware, and Eki Station Clock, created for Sapporo Station in Hokkaido. Happily, this handsome volume offers much more, including in-the-round sculpture, bas-relief wall murals, and luminous stained glass installations.Takenobu Igarashi: Design and Fine Art, which concludes with a comprehensive bibliography, annotated biography and catalogue of works, dramatically illustrates why Igarashi has fascinated the worlds of graphics, industrial design and fine art for nearly five decades.