Red Flag

Red was a recurring chromatic register throughout Shiraga's oeuvre, present since the early Gutai years and associated with vital force as well as with the visceral "blood" iconography that recurred in the group's performance work. This silkscreen, like the rest of his print production, translates the gestural sweep of his foot-paintings into the flat saturated zones characteristic of screenprinting. Where his oil paintings preserve the impasto record of pigment pushed by the soles of the feet — Shiraga suspended above the canvas by a rope strung from the studio ceiling — the print isolates the trajectory of that gesture as graphic statement. The title invites a political reading, but Shiraga's color symbolism was rooted in Buddhist and East Asian classical associations as much as in modernist iconography; he took Tendai vows in 1971 and named many works from religious and literary sources.