Japanese artist Sadaharu Horio was a member of the Gutai Art Association and is also considered a pioneer of modern Kobe performance art.
Read MoreSadaharu Horio was born in 1939 in Kobe, Japan. Despite wanting to pursue a career in art through university, Horio instead began working in a shipyard. During this time, however, he began to paint and learn more about global art movements.
In 1956, he showed his work for the first time at the Shinko Independent Exhibition. His following exhibitions during this period led him to be introduced to Jiro Yoshihara, the founder of avant garde artist group Gutai Art Association.
Horio began exhibiting with artists from the Gutai Art Association in 1965 before officially joining in 1966. He remained with the group until its dissolution in 1972. After the Gutai Art Association disbanded, Horio continued to work with artist collectives and was a founding member of artist collective Bonkura and on-site art squad Kuki.
Between 1979 to 1985, Horio ran the Higashimon Gallery in Kobe and invited young artists to create experimental exhibitions in his space. One of the exhibitions during this time was Chu Enoki's BAR ROSE CHU (1979), where he constructed a bar in the exhibition space and entertained its visitors dressed as a hostess.
Horio passed away in 2018 in Kobe at 79 years old.
Hugely influential on Japanese contemporary art, Sadaharu Horio's paintings and performances are playful incorporations of art and the everyday.
During his involvement with the Gutai Art Association, Horio often experimented with material, form, and the non-figurative. In his piece Work (1967), Horio hammered nails into the middle of the canvas to create a depression. He then added pieces of fabric hardened with plaster and finally painted on these layers. The resulting work was both a painting and a critique on paintings traditional forms.
Even well after the Gutai Art Association's dissolution, Horio continued to root his art practice into the ordinary and commonplace, taking from everyday objects and surfaces including scraps of metal, pieces of wood, and discarded material.
Horio's artworks have embraced both routine and spontaneity. When he was diagnosed with acute cataracts and was left with the possibility of becoming blind, Horio began a practice of painting a variety of objects with one colour a day. This practice, which he called ironuri (paint placement), enabled Horio to maintain a daily practice of painting, integrating art into his everyday life.
Apart from ironuri, Horio also developed ippun dahō (one-minute hitting method) in the 90s, in which the artist added one layer of paint to an object each morning, executing daily drawings within less than a minute. He used his practice of ippun dahō in his performance works, most notably in his '100 Yen Paintings' (2002) series. In this work, viewers would insert ¥100 to a vending machine-like booth where Horio would be sitting creating quick and spontaneous works on paper.
Between 1992—2002, Horio and his co-worker Hisaki Shuji created a large-scale woodblock series entitled 'Myokonin-den.' With Horio responsible for the images and Shuji with carving, the duo created over 100 works within the next 10 years. This series was inspired by a book of the same name written about Buddhist devotees of the Shinshu sect who, despite their illiteracy, found spiritual awakening through their faith.
Sadaharo Horio's artwork has been frequently exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions, institutionally and in commercial galleries.
He exhibited at the Ashiya City Exhibition from 1957 onwards, and since then he has held solo exhibitions at the Shinanobashi Gallery, Kobe; Gutai Pinacotheca, Osaka; KEWENIG, Berlin and Axel Vervoordt Gallery.
Since 1957, he has participated in several historical exhibitions and performance events at Ashiya City Museum of Art & History and in 1964, he exhibited at Kyoto Independents. His group exhibitions include Yokohama International Triennial of Contemporary Art (2005); In-Finitum at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice (2009); Atarimae-No-Koto at Frankfurt LAB (2011); Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2012); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2013).
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2021
