Shun

This 1990 screenprint belongs to the editioned graphic work Shiraga produced alongside his foot-paintings in his late career. By the late 1980s he was working in his Amagasaki studio on large-scale oil canvases and translating the same gestural vocabulary into silkscreens for wider circulation. The medium flattens the impasto of his oil paintings into saturated zones of pigment while preserving the directional arc of his characteristic sweep. Where the original foot-paintings record the artist's body suspended from a rope and pushing thick pigment with the soles of his feet, the screenprint isolates the trajectory of that gesture as graphic shape. "Shun" (春) is the standard reading for "spring," a thematic register Shiraga drew on alongside his Buddhist and Chinese-classical titles after taking Tendai vows in 1971.