Kazuo Shiraga

Kazuo Shiraga (白髪一雄, 1924 — 2008) was a central member of the Gutai Art Association and one of the principal figures of postwar Japanese avant-garde painting. Born in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, he is best known for the foot-paintings he began producing in 1954: large canvases worked in oil with the artist suspended from a rope above the surface and pushing the pigment around with the soles of his feet. The technique, which he refined for more than half a century of working life, became one of the defining gestures of Gutai practice and one of the most-cited examples of postwar Japanese action painting.

Shiraga's training was traditional and unconventional in equal measure. After studying nihonga (Japanese-style painting) at the Kyoto City School of Painting, he abandoned the genre to pursue Western-style oil painting and joined a number of early postwar collective groups. In 1952 he co-founded the Zero Society (Zero-kai) alongside Atsuko Tanaka, Akira Kanayama, and Saburo Murakami; the four of them subsequently joined the Gutai Art Association in 1955, and Jiro Yoshihara published the Gutai Manifesto the following year. Shiraga's foot-painting work caught the attention of the French critic Michel Tapié, who placed Gutai within the international Art Informel movement and championed the group through European exhibitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1971 Shiraga underwent a dramatic religious conversion, taking ordination as a Buddhist priest at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei (the head temple of the Tendai school) and adopting the monastic name Sodo. Following a period of ascetic training, he returned to painting under his Buddhist name, retaining the foot-painting technique that defined his identity. His later work included the long 'Seven Warring States of Zhou Dynasty China' series, which drew on the history of China's Warring States period. He continued producing large-format oil paintings until shortly before his death in 2008.

Shiraga's printmaking practice, while secondary to his painting, is substantial and well-documented. The principal body of editioned prints is concentrated in the 1980s and 1990s, when he worked with the Hoshida Graphics atelier in Kyoto and other Japanese print publishers to issue silkscreens that translated the foot-painting gestures into editioned form. The 1990 portfolio 'Prints by Kazuo Shiraga 1990' was issued in editions of 60, with each print bearing the blind stamp of Hoshida Graphics. Earlier silkscreens include 'Passionate Winner' (1988, edition of 300), 'Shun' (1990, edition of 60), and 'Red Flag' (silkscreen, edition of 60). The 'Seven Warring States of Zhou Dynasty China' series was issued in screenprint editions of 60 in 1993, with individual prints titled 'Swallow,' 'Wei,' and others corresponding to the Warring States. Late prints translated his energetic painting gestures into large-format silkscreen.

Shiraga's work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and many other institutions. He participated in the 1993 Venice Biennale, by which time Gutai's international standing had been substantially reassessed by Western critics and curators. He died in Amagasaki on 8 April 2008 at the age of 83.

Within the postwar Japanese avant-garde Shiraga occupies an unusually visible position: a Gutai painter whose foot-painting technique and Buddhist transformation gave his career a distinctive arc, and whose silkscreen editions of the 1980s-90s extend his painterly gesture into the editioned print market while preserving the bodily intensity that defined his canvases. The prints continue to circulate through Whitestone Gallery (Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other branches), with editions typically issued at 60 impressions per image.