Kazuo SHIRAGA (1924-2008) Sakuhin, 1962 Oil on canvas Signed and dated 1962 lower right Countersigned, dated 1962 and titled "Sakuhin" (Work) in Japanese on the back [Catalogue addition]. 130 x 162.5 cm We would like to thank Mrs Aya SENOO of the Amagasaki Cultural Foundation and Hisao SHIRAGA, the artist's successor, for helping us to find the title of the work and for allowing us to publish it in our sale catalogue and in specialist publications to announce our sale, in an official letter dated 16 May 2024. PROVENANCE : - Artist's studio - Galerie STADLER, Paris (label on the back) - Private collection, Nice NOTE : - A number of radical avant-garde art movements emerged in Japan in the 1950s, including the Gutai ("body as instrument") movement, a shifting group from 1955 to 1972, theorised and founded by Yoshihara Jirô (1905-1972). - Gutai painting is born of the living gesture, densified by the force of "chi", a vital and spiritual energy whose intensity manifests itself in shapes and colours laid down in a rapid, impulsive and carnal gesture. This is a performance art that places as much importance on the physical action involved in creating the work as on the result itself, revealing the density of the original material. - Kazuo Shiraga, one of the leading figures in the Gutai movement, of which he has been a member since 1955, advocates a physical rediscovery of the elements: "Gutai art does not transform or divert matter; it brings it to life. After the abyss of defeat in the Second World War and the disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was necessary to overcome the trauma of horror and achieve resilience. "My art is not influenced by my experience at the front. I only saw people covered in blood. I only saw the victims of the war, and Osaka completely devastated. Lots of people, smeared with blood, soot and mud, came to Osaka Castle looking for help... I saw a lot of bombed-out landscapes, people wailing, others immobilised, traumatised, people bleeding, people even on the verge of death. These memories materialised in my work" (in Ming Tiampo, op.cit., 2003, p. 177). - Kazuo Shiraga places an abundance of coloured oil on a canvas placed on the floor and then, clinging to a rope installed on the ceiling of his studio, glides at will with his feet over the surface with a real impression of velocity. "I tried it with my bare hands, using my fingers. Then, convinced that I had to go further and further, I went further and further and, as I went further and further, I found my feet. That was it! Peindre avec les pieds" (in Shiraga Kazuo, "Koi koo5o" (The very act), Clllui, no. 3, October 1955). - Kazuo Shiraga's rapid movements follow a precise and considered rhythm, tracing complex networks of interlacing and dynamic furrows that transcribe the "chi". Combined with the effects of gravitational force, this pictorial material overkill is invested with all the bodily energy and spiritual forces that confront each other. The viewer enters the beyond-matter of a painting that has become action and a pure expressive outpouring, an aesthetic of transcendence and testimony to a meeting between body and matter. - 1962, the year in which our canvas was created, was a turning point for Shiraga, whose international career was finally taking off. The Stadler gallery in Paris hosted his first solo exhibition outside Japan - another group show had taken place in 1959 - after he had been discovered by the art critic Michel Tapié in Osaka in 1957. This painting was certainly one of them (faded label on the back of the Galerie Stadler, 51 rue de Seine - 75006 Paris. Probable exhibition: "Shiraga", Galerie Stadler, Paris, 26 January to 22 February 1962). Prior registration is required in order to bid on this lot. Please contact us on +33 (0)1.40.20.02.82 or [email protected] As a registration is required to bid on this lot, please contact us : +33 (0)1.40.20.02.82 or [email protected]