Eiko Ishioka. Who Am I?

The Eiko Ishioka exhibition is the first presentation in Poland of one of the icons of Japanese design, the most important graphic designer from the Land of the Rising Sun. From her rich body of work, spanning advertising campaigns, publishing projects, theatre and film stage design, and direction, this year's exhibition at the Manggha Museum will feature posters exclusively.

Nearly 80 posters that today belong to the canon of contemporary graphic design in Japan will be shown. Among them are those created for the PARCO promotional campaigns: Don’t stare at the nude, be naked (1975), Girls, be Ambitious! (1975), Nightingale Sings for No One but Herself (1976), Ah, Our Roots! (1977), My dear Superstar (1978), Dressed to kill and no place to go (1980), and the illustrative series Very Parco (1983).

The exhibition will also present works for Issey Miyake fashion shows, advertising posters for the Japanese companies Shiseido and Diana, as well as posters promoting the publisher Kadokawa Shoten. The show will be complemented by posters for iconic films: Innocents (dir. Luchino Visconti), Koyaanisqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio), Apocalypse Now, and Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola).

The posters created by artistic director Eiko Ishioka are perfectly considered compositions, most often made using photography, but also illustrative works for which she invited outstanding artists. The posters on display reveal the creative energy invested in each work, carrying the strong, personal message of their author.

All works come from the collection of the Poster and Design Gallery of the National Museum in Poznań, which acquired archival copies from 1968–1993.

Eiko Ishioka (1938–2012)

She belongs to the circle of outstanding figures of Japanese design, alongside, among others, Shigeo Fukuda, Yusaku Kamekura, Kazumasa Nagai, Kōichi Satō, Ikko Tanaka, Tadanori Yokoo, and Kenya Hara, and she is the only woman artist in graphic design who has achieved international success in this field.

After completing her studies at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Ishioka attended lectures at the international WoDeCo (World Design Conference) in Tokyo in 1960. A year later she joined the advertising department of the cosmetics company Shiseido. In 1965 she became the first woman to receive the Japan Advertising Artists Club Award. Five years later she founded her own design office, Eiko Ishioka Design Office, and began working as an independent designer and art director. She played an enormous role in shaping the iconography of Japanese advertising posters in the 1970s and 1980s.

From 1973 she was engaged in designing and producing accompanying materials, including posters, press advertisements and television programmes for the PARCO department stores. As art director of the advertising campaigns, she co-created the image of a company with which she fully identified. In her work she asked the question “What is PARCO?”, and through advertising posters she created the image of the modern woman in Japan.

In the mid-1970s she also prepared a promotional campaign for the publisher Kadokawa Shoten under the slogan Woman! Turn off your TV sets!. She designed the stage set, posters and publications accompanying the show Issey Miyake and Twelve Black Women. She also prepared a series of posters and the stage design for the exhibition Leni Riefenstahl: Nuba in 1980 at the Seibu Art Museum.

In 1980 she arrived in New York already as a recognised advertising artist who was constantly going beyond the boundaries of her field. Since then she has realised many projects in theatre and film stage design, and has designed album covers, including for Miles Davis and Björk. She is the author of iconic posters for the films Innocents directed by Luchino…