Kazuo Shiraga b.1924 - d.2008

Paintings and Watercolours

The following passage is the catalogue essay from the gallery's last exhibition in 2007:

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. It was an actualisation of the exhortation made by the leader of the Gutai group, Yoshihara Jiro, to ‘create paintings of a kind that nobody has ever seen before’. 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 trained as a traditional Japanese painter but had developed a taste for the unctuous quality of oil paints in preference to the mineral pigments he had previously used. The use of his own body was ‘a totally logical way of painting’ that suggested the need to leave the confines of the studio and to work outdoors. Shiraga’s performance at the 1955 Gutai exhibition was the first fully-fledged realisation of this new direction in his work. His use of clay had its precedent in the piece he had created three months earlier for the ‘Modern Art Outdoor Experimental Exhibition to Challenge the Midsummer Sun’. This was a round form made of clay wrapped in vinyl sheeting. While Shiraga claims he had no plans for ‘Challenging Mud’ at the time, there is no doubt that Yoshihara’s outdoor exhibition spurred Shiraga and other Gutai artists to think radically about the use of materials and space. Impoverished and faced with the challenge of creating outdoor installations, they turned to familiar everyday materials or at that time new products such as vinyl sheeting, thereby expanding the vocabulary of contemporary art. The result was a flurry of experimentation with new materials and alternative ways of working which in Shiraga’s case, as noted above, survive only as documentary traces. Shiraga’s interest at this time was less in producing permanent works of art than in alternating moments of frenzied interaction with clay with periods of quietude following the dismantling and clearing away of his installations.

Shiraga is justly famous as the only important artist in the world to paint with his feet. In actuality he paints 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. Yoshihara, however, was critical of Shiraga’s fan-shaped paper objects and his desire to experiment with alternative ways of painting. He admonished him firmly with the words, ‘Shiraga is a nobody if he doesn’t paint with his feet.’

The current exhibition’s main focus is on Shiraga’s paintings of the past two decades. One is amazed by the timeless quality of his work, the pieces he produced in his seventies being no less vital than those dating from when he joined the Gutai group in his early thirties. A powerful tension has always imbued his work. I have heard him remark that, ‘whenever I stand on the canvas ready to paint, I am filled with the same feeling of engagement’. It is as if his body is remembering how to paint. When, as in this exhibition, we see a group of Shiraga’s paintings displayed together, we immediately sense the consistency of the energy with which he has worked. It is meaningless to try to identify a stylistic progression in his oeuvre. Whenever I look at his paintings, the thought that comes to mind is that he has always been one and the same person. ‘A painting never seen’ becomes ‘a painter never encountered’ and so starts a new chapter.

Kawasaki Koichi,
Chief Curator, The Ashiya City Museum of Art, Hyogo, Japan.
September 2007