Kazuo Shiraga

Acquired directly from the artist

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of wear and handling to the edges and some hairline craquelure at the pull margins, resulting in some minor spots of paint loss. There are a few areas of light hairline craquelure in the upper left red paint visible upon close inspection. The impasto is thick and stable throughout the composition. There appears to be a small ½-inch area of paint loss in the center of the work. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. There are scattered spots of varnish which fluoresce brightly under Ultraviolet light but do not appear to be the result of restoration and appear inherent to the artist's chosen medium. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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For Kazuo Shiraga, a painting was defined by the gestures of its creation. He famously used non-traditional techniques, from dripping paints to painting with his feet, to make his works, including performances using parts or the entirety of his body as a tool. A pivotal member of Japan’s Gutai group, Shiraga sought to break with the artistic conventions of the past in favor of an expressive, non-figural gestural abstraction. Shiraga’s radical and aesthetically arresting “performance paintings” stand as exceptional milestones in the history of Japanese avant-garde art, as well as post-war Western art more generally. 

Precipitated by the advent of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s, ripples of a revolution in painting began to emerge on a global stage by the early 1950s. The “action painting” of Western artists Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein, consciously rebelling against an institution dominated by figuration, reverberated halfway around the world. In Japan, a group of painters that came to be known as the Gutai group was creating stylistically similar pictures that sprung from a completely disparate yet intertwined influence: the trauma of the Second World War. Michel Tapié, one of the twentieth century’s great international critics, was instrumental in discovering and promoting the work of the Gutai for a Western audience. Upon premiering their work at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1958, the Gutai group emerged as influential with significant formative impacts on both the development of performance art, as well as radical artistic movements, such as Fluxus. The ground-breaking artistic approach fusing psyche and physicality pursued by Shiraga and his colleagues stood as a benchmark for artists worldwide.

Epitomizing the Gutai group’s progressive mission, Shiraga took the traditional medium of painting as his point of departure, in order to seek innovative ways to create commanding, gestural works. Shiraga unconventionally painted with the canvas flat on the floor. Fastening a rope above the painting he swung across the surface in energetic, gestural motions, using his feet to spread thick layers of paint. The uniquely physical nature of his artistic expression was closely linked to his radical performances of a similar vein. Wrestling with a mountain of clay and mud during the first Gutai exhibition in 1955, and turning his action painting into a trailblazing performance during the group’s second exhibition the following year, the artist celebrated action itself as the fundamental artwork, his painting becoming the trace of unrestrained energy and physical expression.

Shiraga began to erase the distance between his body and his art, eventually using nothing other than himself as the creative implement, eliminating the trained hand altogether. In this aspect, Shiraga's technique recalls Pollock's choreographies, or more directly, Yves Klein. Though contemporaries, these artists did not associate with each other – yet similarly developed an art which joined body and mind.

Shiraga did not provide titles for his paintings, until Michel Tapié commissioned works for exhibitions outside Japan. The present work, Fukuju kai muryo, comes from Zen terminology, a line taken from a four-part phrase from the Kannon Sutra essentially meaning "The ocean of blessings and fortune is boundless." Shiraga entered the Buddhist priesthood in 1971, and this notion praises Guanyin’s virtues as a metaphor for the ocean where good fortune gathers, celebrating the Kannon bodhisattva’s infinite vastness of prosperity and virtue.

Created in 1982, Fukuju kai muryo's mesmerizing dynamism and vigor is a striking example of Shiraga's unrelenting commitment to action painting as the powerful synthesis of the artist and his work. With heavy layers of earthy green and brown, deep black, and radiant red, the dense strokes represent traces of the artist's vigorous movements. Against the peaceful interaction of deep colors, this powerful stroke of red offers a violent interruption – mesmerizing for its contrast, yet startling. Despite the visual tension of the central bright red stroke, the colors seemingly enthralled in a visceral struggle, the wide, loose strokes hold a natural elegance, reminiscent of the classical Japanese tradition of calligraphy. The thick layers of paint contain a tactile dimensionality and energy. However, devoid of any conventional notion of composition, the raw force constitutes form.

With longstanding artistic production and international influence that far outlasted the Gutai group, which disbanded in 1972, Shiraga is recognized as one of Japan’s most influential artists. This painting inhabits all of the gestural qualities of the artist's oeuvre and with its color and line radiating outward from the center of the canvas. Fukuju kai muryo is explosive in its tonality and expressive in its movement. Shiraga continued his foot paintings until his death in 2008, staying committed to his unique mode of artistic expression with unrelenting energy and dynamism. Embracing vitality and action as his main mode of expression, he challenged the parameters of painting as radically as any great avant-gardist of the post-war period.