
Lucky Strike, from the series The Map
A crumpled Lucky Strike cigarette package fills the frame in Kikuji Kawada's haunting gelatin silver print, its familiar branding rendered strange and almost archaeological through the artist's intense, close-up lens. Part of his seminal series *The Map* (1960–65), the image transforms an ordinary piece of American consumer debris into a charged symbol of postwar Japan's fraught relationship with Western culture and occupation. Kawada's high-contrast, texture-rich printing technique imbues the mundane object with a sense of decay and historical weight, as if it were a relic unearthed from the ruins of a bombed landscape.
- Medium
- gelatin silver print, printed 1986
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Phillips
🔨 Auction Lot
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale
November 10, 2015
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