Shigeo Fukuda (福田 繁雄, Fukuda Shigeo, February 4, 1932 – January 11, 2009) was a sculptor, medallist, graphic artist and billboard designer who created optical illusions. His art pieces usually picture deception, such as Lunch With a Helmet On, a sculpture created entirely from forks, knives, and spoons, that casts a detailed shadow of a motorcycle.
Fukuda was born upon February 4, 1932 in Tokyo to a relations that was operating in manufacturing toys. After the fall of World War II, he became avid in the minimalist Swiss Style of graphic design, and graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1956.
The New York Times described how Fukuda’s posters “distilled highbrow concepts into compelling images of logo-simplicity”. His commercial proceed included his initiation of the attributed poster for the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. A 1980 poster created for Amnesty International features a clenched fist interwoven with mordant wire, with the letter “S” in the word “Amnesty” at the summit of the public notice formed from a combined shackle. “Victory 1945”, one of his best-known works, features a projectile heading straight at the launch of the barrel of a cannon. A pair of posters created to celebrate Earth Day include a design showing the Earth as a seed opening neighboring a hermetic sea-blue background and “1982 Happy Earth Day”, which shows an axe afterward its head adjacent to the arena and a small branch sprouting upwards from its handle.
In 1987, Fukuda was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in New York City, which described him as “Japan’s consummate visual communicator”, making him the first Japanese designer selected for this recognition. The Art Directors Club noted the “bitingly satirical commentary upon the lack of direction of war” shown in “Victory 1945”, which won him the grand prize at the 1975 Warsaw Poster Contest, a competition whose proceeds went to the Peace Fund Movement.
His house outside Tokyo featured a 4-foot-high (1.2 m) front right of entry that would appear far away from someone in story to the house. This entrйe was a visual trick, with the actual admission to the house being an unornamented white gain admission to designed to amalgamation in seamlessly following the walls of the house.
Fukuda died January 11, 2009, after suffering a subarachnoid hemorrhage.
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