25 Facts About Saburo Murakami

Saburo Murakami was a Japanese visual and performance artist.

Saburo Murakami was a member of the Gutai Art Association and is best known for his paper-breaking performances in which he burst through kraft paper stretched on large wooden frames.

Saburo Murakami was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1925, as the third son of an English teacher at Kwansei Gakuin Junior High School.

Saburo Murakami entered Kwansei Gakuin University in 1943, joined the university's painting club Gengetsu-kai and began studying oil painting under Hiroshi Kanbara.

In 1949, Saburo Murakami participated in the exhibitions of the art association Shinseisakuha kyokai and began to study under painter Tsuguro Ito.

In 1950, Saburo Murakami began working as an art teacher at an elementary school.

Saburo Murakami continued to teach art in elementary, middle and high schools, universities and kindergartens throughout his life.

In 1952 Saburo Murakami formed the Zero-kai with Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, and Akira Kanayama, all fellows from the Shinseisaku Kyokai.

Saburo Murakami was a fixture in the group's international collaborations with French art critic Michel Tapie, art dealers Rodolphe Stadler in Paris and Martha Jackson in New York, and with the artist groups ZERO and Nul in Germany and the Netherlands.

In 1960, Saburo Murakami was appointed the Japanese representative at the International Centre of Aesthetic Research Committee in Turin.

In 1966, on behalf of Gutai, Saburo Murakami travelled to the Netherlands to facilitate the group's participation in exhibitions with the Dutch and German artists groups Nul and ZERO.

Around 1975, Saburo Murakami became involved in the artist collaborative Artist Union formed by fellow Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto and organized exhibitions, symposiums and mail art projects.

Saburo Murakami continued to exhibit new works in group exhibitions such as the Ashiya City Exhibitions, but he participated in an increasing number of exhibitions worldwide featuring Gutai.

Saburo Murakami recounted that his paper-breaking was inspired by his toddler son, who in a tantrum burst through the fusuma paper space divider at their home.

Around 1953, Saburo Murakami gave up figurative painting and began making abstract paintings with surfaces that were structured in impastoed segments of oil paint.

Saburo Murakami continued to perform the act of paper-breaking throughout his entire life, varying in the number and quality of paper screens as well as in the structure.

In 1957, Saburo Murakami created a number of paintings applying nikawa, an animal glue used in Nihonga painting, to the canvas, with the effect that the surface gradually peels off with time.

Between 1958 and 1963, when Gutai was working with the French art critic and advocate of Informel, Michel Tapie, Saburo Murakami created gestural abstract paintings with multiple layers of synthetic resin paint applied in dynamic rough movements and streaming down the surface.

Saburo Murakami experimented with varying the structures of surfaces by attaching wooden frames or molded plaster.

From 1963 onward, Saburo Murakami adopted a new style in his paintings by reducing the number of colors of paint and simplifying the pictorial formal elements, by which he thematized the boundaries of painting.

In 1971, Saburo Murakami held a solo exhibition, during which wooden boxes were placed throughout the city of Osaka and then collected and dismantled in the gallery Mori's Form.

Saburo Murakami was a renowned painter, whose highly conceptual methods and presentation led to experimentation with a variety of painting gestures inspired by children.

Saburo Murakami's art is characterized by a highly conceptual, relational and at the same time strongly intuitive approach that often materialized in seemingly simple works that bring into focus the effects and the experience of space and time, chance and intuition.

Until the 1990s, Saburo Murakami's works were predominantly dealt with in the context of the art historical assessment of the Gutai group at large.

Since the 1990s, Saburo Murakami's works, including his paintings from the 1960s and his performative exhibitions from the 1970s, have been increasingly reconsidered art historically and acknowledged.