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Written by William Billings
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Wednesday, 09 December 2009 05:29 |
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NEW YORK, NY.- McCaffrey Fine Art is showing at their
new gallery at 23 East 67th Street the first ever solo exhibition of Kazuo
Shiraga in the United States.He succeeded in creating paintings
of great innovation with his unique style that involved sliding, spinning,
and swirling his feet in mounds of oil paint on large sheets of paper laid
on the floor. By the time of his 1957 “performance painting” on stage,
Sanbaso–-Super Modern, Shiraga was amongst the most avant-garde artists
working anywhere and his work was drawing international attention.
Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades which continues through January 23,
2010.
Born in Amagasaki, Japan in 1924, Shiraga
co-founded the Zero Society (Zero-kai) with Saburo Murakami and
Akira Kanayama in 1952. In 1955 he joined the legendary collective Gutai
(Gutai Art Association) and made a series of revolutionary works that art
historian Reiko Tomii calls “performance paintings,” including Challenging
Mud, 1955 (in which he wrestled with several tons of mud) and Red Logs,
1955 (a structure made of wood logs that Shiraga hacked into with an axe).
His distinct and inimitable style of foot painting emerged the year prior,
in 1954. Aware of Jackson Pollock since 1951, Shiraga—like his
contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Yves Klein—sought to
create work that moved beyond the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism.
Shiraga’s work was first introduced to the American public under
the auspices of a Gutai exhibition held at Martha Jackson Gallery in
September 1958. His work was largely dismissed as derivative and his great
originality went unrecognized in New York in what amounted to an
extraordinary misreading of his work. However, having realized a means so
unmistakably his own, Shiraga continued to refine and rework his signature
style for the remainder of his long career, creating challenging paintings
of visceral energy and visual power. Shiraga’s six-decade career proved
enduringly provocative and extremely successful in Europe and Japan. Yet,
with the exception of his inclusion in survey exhibitions such as Japanese
Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York (1994) and Out of Actions: Between Performance and the
Object at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998), Shiraga’s
work has remained largely unknown in the United States. This exhibition
seeks to rectify that, bringing together documentary films and paintings
that demonstrate Shiraga’s sustained aesthetic achievement.
This
exhibition is accompanied by the first in-depth publication on Shiraga’s
work in English. It features essays by art historian Reiko Tomii and
Fergus McCaffrey that describe and reinterpret the artist’s career,
locating his development within the context of his international peers.
Previously unavailable writings and interviews in English translation
accompany color plates that document the span of Shiraga’s career from his
earliest developments until his death in 2008. Visit :
http://www.mccaffreyfineart.com/
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