Kazuo Shiraga

In October 1955 at the first Gutai exhibition in Tokyo Kazuo Shiraga enacted his renowned performance, ‘Challenging Mud’. It involved him wrestling with a truckload of clay mixed with cement that had been emptied into the courtyard of the exhibition venue. The performance, which he repeated three times during the course of the exhibition, survives only in the form of photographs and film footage. At the time of the Gutai exhibition Shiraga had already started to paint with his feet. This substitution of the human body for the paintbrush was totally revolutionary.

Shiraga was justly famous as the only important artist in the world to paint with his feet. In actuality he painted not just with his feet but with his whole body, an approach he discovered through his engagement with clay. While anybody could have thought of working in this way, we are indebted to Shiraga for having done so in such a compelling and dramatic manner.

In about 1964 Shiraga started to use wooden boards to paint with. The resulting fan-shaped works were charged with a sense of speed and centrifugal energy different from but no less powerful than the dynamism of his feet paintings. He adopted this method as a way forwards from what he felt to be the staleness creeping into his work.