Raw dynamism, unrestrained gesture and dense materiality define this visceral early work by Shiraga Kazuo, whose use of profound bodily exertion to rupture the conventions of painting and representation earned him international acclaim in the latter half of the 20th century. Shiraga was born in the industrial city of Amagasaki, west of Osaka, and was one of the earliest and most renowned members of Japan’s iconic Gutai Art Association. Founded in Osaka in 1954, the Gutai group was Japan’s most influential avant-garde post-war collective. Their radical experiments with process anticipated later conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the New York Happenings made famous by Allan Kaprow in the late 1950s, which Yayoi Kusama later revisited.

Painted in 1962, Untitled epitomizes Shiraga’s richly worked performance paintings through which he sought to interrogate the relationship between material and movement, in accordance with Gutai’s emphasis on raising physical matter to the height of the human spirit. In Untitled, thick daubs of red oil paint have been applied from the tube directly to the canvas and forcefully manipulated by the artist with his bare feet. The result is a profusion of vibrantly coloured kick strokes: streaks and smears of once liquid material punctuated by matted accretions of impasto.

Shiraga’s works from this period are informed by memories of war and characterized by undercurrents of violence. There is a prevailing use of crimson lake, which Shiraga said ‘reeks of blood.’ This he worked into bold configurations of highly charged, muscular marks that convey immediacy, brute physicality, and the savagery of battle and of the hunt. In 1963, a year after Untitled was painted, he incorporated boar hide into two paintings: Wild Boar Hunting I and Wild Boar Hunting II (Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, respectively). The clotted accumulations of red paint across the pelts are starkly reminiscent of blood around an open wound and the effect is visceral and unsettling. Eight years earlier in 1955, Shiraga had described the symbiosis of destruction and creation inherent in his practice: ‘I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion.’

The artist had begun painting with his feet in 1954. Casting aside the traditional painter’s easel, he laid the canvas on the floor and, clinging to a rope above for support, swung and spun himself across the surface through pools of paint, creating powerful arcs of vivid, viscous colour with his feet. Writing two years later in the fourth volume of the Gutai journal, he explained, ‘One has to dare to imagine and undertake something senseless. A dimension in which something that now appears senseless will no longer be senseless.’ For Shiraga, painting with his feet permitted an unmediated encounter with matter; the canvas was no longer a screen upon which to project an image or state of mind but a site of primal physical expression as body and material collided, all formal constraints eliminated. Recollecting his early artistic motivation in an interview in 1973, Shiraga described how ‘I wanted to create paintings with no composition or no sense of colours, no nothing.’

Shiraga’s pioneering techniques and philosophy sought to surpass the legacy of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism and prefigured those of Yves Klein, who began to incorporate live action into his practice in 1958 inspired by his early encounters with Gutai. The 1950s had seen the growth of the group’s national and international reputation, thanks in part to the fruitful collaboration of French art critic and curator, Michel Tapié and Gutai’s founder, Jiro Yoshiara, as well as the group’s documentation and widespread publication of their art. In 1956, following Pollock’s death, copies of the Gutai journal were found amongst his papers. Two years later, in 1958, works by Shiraga and other Gutai members were shown alongside European and American artists including Antoni Tàpies, Karel Appel, Robert Motherwell, Klein and Pollock in the seminal exhibition, The International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai at the Osaka International Festival.

By 1962, the Gutai Art Association has established itself as a small but significant group of highly innovative, avant-garde artists, whose newly opened exhibition space, the Gutai Pinacotheca, was attracting the interest of the global artworld. Shiraga’s bold performance paintings were also achieving wide acclaim and, in 1962, he mounted more solo shows than in any other year of his career. These included his first solo shows on the international arena – at Galerie Stadler, Paris and the International Center for Aesthetic Research in Turin – as well as exhibitions in Osaka and in Tokyo.

Today, Shiraga’s paintings are housed in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Dallas Museum of Art, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others, securing his global reputation as one of the great visionaries of post-war Japanese art.