30 Facts About Kazuo Shiraga

Kazuo Shiraga was a Japanese abstract painter and the first-generation member of the postwar artists collective Gutai Art Association.

Kazuo Shiraga's studies were interrupted when he was drafted by the Japanese army in 1944.

Kazuo Shiraga resumed his studies in 1945 after the end of World War II.

In 1946 Kazuo Shiraga remained bedridden for several months after contracting pneumonia associated with rheumatic fever.

In 1948, Kazuo Shiraga married Fujiko Uemura, who eventually became an artist of her own, but who committed herself to assisting her husband's artistic production.

At Ito's recommendation, Kazuo Shiraga joined the Shinseisaku Kyokai and showed his works in the association's exhibitions in Tokyo and in the Kansai region until 1952.

Kazuo Shiraga attended the meetings of the Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai, founded in 1952 by artists such as Jiro Yoshihara and Kokuta Suda to provide an open forum for cross-genre exchange for artists from the Kansai region.

In 1952, Kazuo Shiraga co-founded Zero-kai with Akira Kanayama and Saburo Murakami, all members of the Shinseisaku Kyokai, who were later joined by Atsuko Tanaka.

Kazuo Shiraga continued to participate in most of Gutai's projects and exhibitions until the group's dissolution following Yoshihara's death in 1972.

Besides a great number of foot paintings, Kazuo Shiraga created objects, performances, and installation artworks, particularly in the context of Gutai events, such as Red Logs at the Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun, Challenging Mud at the First Gutai Art Exhibition in 1955, and the Ultramodern Sanbaso performance at the Gutai Art on the Stage event in 1957.

In 1959, Kazuo Shiraga's works were shown in the exhibition Fifteen Japanese Contemporary Artists Recommended by Tapie at Gendai Gallery in Tokyo, at the XI Premio Lissone internationale per la pittura in Italy, and at the Metamorphismes at Galerie Stadler in Paris.

In 1960, Kazuo Shiraga was selected to contribute to the 4th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, a major biennial exhibition.

In 1962, Kazuo Shiraga held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Stadler, Paris, followed by another at the Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka.

In 1971 Kazuo Shiraga entered the Tendai sect's priesthood at the Enryaku-ji temple on Mount Hiei and committed himself to Buddhist training in Mikkyo.

Kazuo Shiraga ceased to paint while training and resumed regular painting activities after his ordination in 1974.

Kazuo Shiraga was awarded the Hyogo Prefectural Cultural Prize in 1987, the Distinguished Service Medal for Culture in 2001, and the Osaka Art Prize in 2002.

Kazuo Shiraga died at his home in Amagasaki on April 8,2008, of sepsis.

Kazuo Shiraga, who was painting and drawing landscapes and urban cityscapes in his 20s, picked up Post-Impressionist and Surrealist disfiguration in the late 1940s, inspired by European Romanticist literature and Japanese folk tales.

Around 1954, Kazuo Shiraga gave up using tools and used his hands, fingers, and fingernails to smear the oil paint in linear movements all over the canvasses.

Kazuo Shiraga's method involved stepping into the picture to smear the oil paint on a large painting support spread horizontally on the floor, with the intent of avoiding compositional control, structure, and color.

Kazuo Shiraga soon hung a rope from the ceiling of his studio, which he could hold on to, so that he could glide over the painting surface without falling.

Around 1980, Kazuo Shiraga returned to foot painting, in which black and white were the dominant colors, until his death in 2008.

Kazuo Shiraga's making of his foot paintings, which the artist occasionally presented publicly, has been well documented by photographs and films, which shaped the increasing recognition of his painting method as work of performance since the early 1960s, for instance, by Pierre Restany.

Around 1958 Kazuo Shiraga, considering the difficulties to identify his works when sent to Europe, began to entitle his foot paintings with the names of figures from Suikoden, a 14th-century Chinese novel about 108 warrior heroes and their violent fights for justice.

Kazuo Shiraga used the names of 106 heroes as titles for his paintings between 1959 and 1965 and reluctantly applied the names of two remaining figures for paintings he created in 2001.

At times, Kazuo Shiraga combined these objects with oil paintings, such as White Work and Object, White Fan.

At the First Gutai Art Exhibition at Ohara Hall in Tokyo in October 1955, Kazuo Shiraga exhibited two large-scale foot paintings, and, in the yard outside, Red Logs.

Kazuo Shiraga opened the Gutai Art on the Stage show at the Sankei Halls in Osaka and Tokyo in 1957.

Kazuo Shiraga's fascination culminated in works such as his paintings Inoshishigari I and II, for which the artist mounted a boar's hide on a canvas, which he covered with splashes of blood-like red and brown viscous oil paint.

Kazuo Shiraga has never been deployed to the front as a soldier, but he later indicated that his impressions of the devastations by World War II, which he had experienced after his return to Amagasaki, were materialized in his works.