Kokuyou

A founding member of the influential avant-garde Japanese art collective, the Gutai Art Association (1954-1972), Kazuo Shiraga’s work embodies the group’s aesthetic strategy: to break with the conventions of traditional materials in search of innovation and originality. Spiralling uncontrollably outwards from the centrifugal vortex in deep black, in Untitled swathes of oil paint intermingle, coursing up into waves of densely impastoed pigment. Since 1954 Shiraga has painted with his bare feet; propelling himself across the canvas, suspended from a rope, the artist traces deep furrows in the surplus of paint that proliferates the canvas. With the advent of his bare foot technique he claimed, ‘forms were smashed to smithereens, techniques slipped off my palette knife and broke into two’ (K. Shiraga, ‘Action Only (1955)’ in R. Tomii, F. McCaffrey (eds.), Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades, New York, 2009, p. 60). Recently Shiraga and his contemporaries have made a significant re-entry into the public consciousness with a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2013 entitled Gutai: Splendid Playground and their inclusion in the exhibition, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962 in the same year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

First introduced to contemporary Western art practices in 1951 when the third Yomiuri Independent Exhibition travelled to Osaka, Shiraga was fascinated by the work of Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Yet, Shiraga sought to create work that moved beyond the vocabulary of pre-existing art forms and his compelling oeuvre went on to become an enormous influence on the landscape of Post-War art. Shiraga’s action paintings appeal on another level by embodying the concept of binary opposition, or duality. During the creative process, the artist frequently felt the pull of opposing forces-the oil pigments and the use of his feet in painting; his body and the physical medium of his work (the Gutai group did not believe that artists changed material substance, but that they injected meaning into it); his eyes and his heart; and finally, the pull of both his conscious and subconscious minds.