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Raw dynamism, unrestrained gesture and dense materiality define this visceral early work by Shiraga Kazuo, whose use of profound bodily exertion to rupture the conventions of painting and representation earned him international acclaim in the latter half of the 20th century. Shiraga was born in the industrial city of Amagasaki, west of Osaka, and was one of the earliest and most renowned members of Japan’s iconic Gutai Art Association. Founded in Osaka in 1954, the Gutai group was Japan’s most influential avant-garde post-war collective. Their radical experiments with process anticipated later conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the New York Happenings made famous by Allan Kaprow in the late 1950s, which Yayoi Kusama later revisited.
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Painted in 1962, Untitled epitomizes Shiraga’s richly worked performance paintings through which he sought to interrogate the relationship between material and movement, in accordance with Gutai’s emphasis on raising physical matter to the height of the human spirit. In Untitled, thick daubs of red oil paint have been applied from the tube directly to the canvas and forcefully manipulated by the artist with his bare feet. The result is a profusion of vibrantly coloured kick strokes: streaks and smears of once liquid material punctuated by matted accretions of impasto.
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Shiraga KazuoUntitled, 1962Oil on canvas73 x 91 cm | 28 3/4 x 35 7/8 in.
Signed and dated ‘1962’ (lower left) and signed (on the reverse) -
Listen: Art Historian
on violence and gender in post-war Japan, as seen through Untitled
Namiko Kunimoto,
Associate Professor at Ohio State University
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Shiraga’s works from this period are informed by memories of war and characterized by undercurrents of violence. There is a prevailing use of crimson lake, which Shiraga said ‘reeks of blood.’ This he worked into bold configurations of highly charged, muscular marks that convey the brute physicality of battle and the savagery of the hunt. Wild Boar Hunting I and Wild Boar Hunting II (1963) incorporate boar pelts overlaid with clotted accumulations of red paint that are starkly reminiscent of blood around an open wound (Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, respectively). And yet Shiraga was also challenging established ideas of victory and defeat through his works. Several years earlier, the artist had waded through a mass of mixed detritus in a loincloth for his 1955 performance Challenging Mud at the ‘First Gutai Art Exhibition’, speaking to the waste and mud-streaked memories of World War II and the cultural impasse that followed America’s occupation.
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‘If you believe that your art has a spiritual meaning and it helps you develop yourself, such art will truly be on the cutting edge of global culture’
Shiraga Kazuo -
The artist had begun painting with his feet in 1954. Casting aside the traditional painter’s easel, he laid the canvas on the floor and, clinging to a rope above for support, swung and spun himself across the surface through pools of paint, creating powerful arcs of vivid, viscous colour with his feet. Two years later in the fourth volume of the Gutai journal, he explained: ‘One has to dare to imagine and undertake something senseless. A dimension in which something that now appears senseless will no longer be senseless.’ For Shiraga, the canvas was no longer a screen upon which to project an image or state of mind but a site where body and material collided. Recollecting his early artistic motivation in an interview of 1973, Shiraga stated: ‘I wanted to create paintings with no composition or no sense of colours, no nothing.’
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Shiraga’s pioneering techniques and philosophy in some ways surpassed the legacy of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism and prefigured those of Yves Klein, who began to incorporate live action into his practice in 1958. The flourishing internationalism of the 1950s had seen an uptick in artistic exchanges between the Gutai group and western avant-garde movements, thanks in part to the fruitful collaboration between French art critic and curator Michel Tapié and Gutai’s founder, Jiro Yoshihara, as well as Gutai’s assiduous documentation and widespread publication of their art. In 1956, copies of the Gutai journal were found amongst Pollock’s papers after his death. Two years later, in 1958, works by Shiraga and other Gutai members were shown alongside European and American artists including Antoni Tàpies, Karel Appel, Robert Motherwell, Klein and Pollock in the seminal exhibition ‘The International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai’ at the Osaka International Festival.
Robert Motherwell
Black and White
1961
© Dedalus Foundation, Inc. /VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022
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‘I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion’
Shiraga Kazuo -
By the early 1960s, Shiraga’s bold performance paintings were achieving wide acclaim and, in 1962, he mounted more solo exhibitions than in any other year. These included his first solo shows on the international arena – at Galerie Stadler, Paris and the International Center for Aesthetic Research in Turin – as well as exhibitions in Osaka and in Tokyo. Today, Shiraga’s paintings are housed in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Dallas Museum of Art, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others, securing his global reputation as one of the great visionaries of post-war Japanese art.
Unless otherwise stated, artworks © Shiraga Hisao/ Estate of Shiraga Kazuo
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Related content
Shiraga Kazuo
Untitled
1962
Oil on canvas
73 x 91 cm. | 28 3/4 x 35 7/8 in.
Artworks © the artist. ©2022 White Cube
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