Untitled

A member of renowned Japanese avant-garde collectives Gutai and Zero-kai, Shiraga merged abstract painting with bodily performance. The artist first encountered "drip" paintings by Jackson Pollock in 1951 at a Tokyo exhibition, an experience that prompted him to shift his canvas to the floor and to conceive of it as a field for action. Shiraga relinquished traditional painting tools and began applying and manipulating pigments with his hands and, later, only his feet, usually while holding onto a rope suspended overhead. Filled with fleshy gestural marks in impasto blood reds and meaty lavenders, this untitled composition evokes not only Pollock’s strategies but also Japanese martial arts and even wrestling. Its suggestion of physical violence recalls the still-fresh horror of World War II, including the bombing of his native country by U.S. forces.