Killer Joe's Early Times 1965-73

A catalogue raisonné of Keiichi Tanaami's early work, 1965 to 1973, the years in which the Tokyo designer turned the language of American Pop, psychedelia and underground comics into an art of his own.

Named after the Tokyo discotheque for which Tanaami produced graphics in the late 1960s, the volume gathers collage, painting, silkscreen prints and animation: his illustrations for the magazine Shosetsu Gendai, drawings and collages for Art Journal, album covers for the Monkees and Jefferson Airplane, stills from the animation series made for the film festival at Sogetsu Art Center, anti-Vietnam War silkscreens and the painting series of Hollywood actresses. Much of the material was rediscovered in the artist's own storage after decades. Edited by Momoko Fukurama and Shinji Nanzuka with texts by Nils Olsen, Fredi Fischli and Yuji Yamashita, it is a large-format hardcover with 250 colour plates and an obi.

Tanaami (1936–2024) was a protagonist of Japan's postwar avant-garde and one of the first Japanese artists to work across art and commerce; his work appeared in advertising and magazines from 1962, and a 1968 trip to New York and a meeting with Andy Warhol set him on parallel paths of poster design, happenings, prints and record sleeves.