Tadanori Yokoo is one of Japan’s most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists, who has designed film and music posters for some of the greatest bands of the 60′s and 70′s.
Yokoo’s film poster for Roger Corman’s lo-fi cult film The Trip (1967)
Alternate film poster for The Trip (1968)
Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert poster (1972)
Beatles, ‘Star Club’, (1977)
Holst, ‘The Planets’, (1979)
Earth, Wind and Fire, (1976).
Born in the Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, in 1936, Yokoo began his career in stage design for an avant garde theatre in Tokyo. His early work shows the influence of the New York based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular) but Yokoo himself cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima as two of his most formative influences.
In the late 1960s he became interested in mysticism and psychedelia, deepened by travels in India. Because his work was so attuned to 1960s pop culture, he has often been described as the “Japanese Andy Warhol” or likened to psychedelic poster artist Peter Max, but Yokoo’s complex and multi-layered imagery is intensely autobiographical and entirely original. By the late 60s he had already achieved international recognition for his work and was included in the 1968 “Word Image” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Isn’t he fabulous?
mmm m thhis is sexy graphics
that Earth, Wind & Fire poster is ridiculous! Where did you find out about this guy?
Haha, I know! Don’t know really, remember reading about him a while ago. There’s another awesome Czech poster artist of the 70′s I’m gonna post up soon.