Tetsumi Kudo was one of the most innovative artists in Japan in the 1950s, and in France in the ’60s and ’70s exploring the existential possibilities for humanity in an increasingly polluted and consumption-driven world, issues critical in today’s artistic practice and political debate. Beginning his career in Tokyo making heavily impastoed paintings reminiscent of Gutai canvases, Kudo became a prominant figure of the Tokyo Anti-Art movement (1958-62). Most well recognised for his iconic assemblages, live happenings and installations, Kudo's practice has been described as "informed by an atomic imaginary."
Read MoreHis works draw together Dadaist sensibilities with abject subject matter. Body parts, faeces and phallus' appear in lurid, fluorescent colour. Though he believed in the power of art to transform the viewer, Kudo was strongly antihumanist and antimodernist. His apocalyptic vision of the world later influenced such artists as Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelly. Kudo's work has recently received renewed interest and has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2013; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2013; and the Walker Art Center, Mineapolis, 2008.
