KAZUO SHIRAGA

Gutai

Soon after that he joined Gutai Art Association. Gutai emerged out of a Japan torn apart by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the loss of World War II and the American occupation of Japan. Postwar Japan was facing an identity crisis—a struggle between tradition and modernity that was reflected and expressed in the art of Gutai. The artists of Gutai were in the throes of an unimaginably new era. Jiro Yoshihara, a leader of the group, reacted by telling the group to ‘make something that has never existed’.

Style and technique

In his art, Shiraga reflected the emerging new sense of the relationship between body and earth, or an artist and his materials. In works such as Challenging Mud (1955) he wrestled with a mud mixture, in doing so forming it into sculptural and painterly shapes. While Yoshihara saw physical remnants of a performance as residue, Shiraga valued each part equally. Shiraga knew of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism, but sought something beyond what Abstract Expressionism could provide.

Foot painting

Shiraga is perhaps best known for the foot paintings that he began creating from the 1950s. To make these paintings, he would flick or shovel oil paint from a bucket onto large sheets of paper or canvas that were placed on the floor. He would then move the paint around with his feet while holding onto a rope on the ceiling. Shiraga’s method was initially a logical solution to the problem of working with a large canvas on the floor (to avoid dripping) and being unable to reach the very middle. To reach this unreachable centre, Shiraga decided he must ‘get inside the canvas.’ In this collaborative relationship with his medium, Shiraga created a range of strikingly textured large-scale paintings.

Performance

The process of Shiraga’s paintings was initially performed to an audience (from around 1957), but eventually became a private aspect of the creation. Shiraga’s performances were pre-Happening-era Happenings. Allan Kaprow himself, the father of the Happening, acknowledges the debt of his Happenings to the Gutai performances he had seen in New York.

Legacy

In 1971 Shiraga entered the Buddhist priesthood of the Enryaku-ji Monastery of Mount Hiei, where he continued to paint under his monk name (Sodo) until his death in 2008. Shiraga enjoyed much acclaim in Japan and Europe over the course of his life, but it was not until after his death that his work flourished in the USA.

Exhibitions

Shiraga’s work part of major art collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Dallas Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Notable exhibitions of Shiraga’s work include:

• Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012)
• Gutai: The Spirit of an Era, The National Art Center, Tokyo (2012)
• Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012)
• Gutai: Splendid Playground, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013)
• Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga, Dallas Museum of Art (2015)
• Into the Unknown World – GUTAI: Differentiation and Integration, National Museum of Art and Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka

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Ocula | 2025