Japanese painter Kazuo Shiraga, a leading member of the 1950s and 1960s Japanese avant-garde group Gutai, died on April 8 in Hyogo Prefecture. Shiraga first came to prominence for his radical use of his own body as a painter’s tool: grasping a rope suspended from the ceiling, he used his feet as a brush to smear paint onto a canvas on the floor. Borrowing ideas about the physicality of painting from American action painters, notably Jackson Pollock, he went further by fully integrating his body into the realization of the work. Shiraga aimed to capture action and speed in his performative paintings, and his large-scale canvases embody a sense of motion and time.

In 1952, along with his fellow artists Saburo Murakami (see AAP 12) and Akira Kanayama, Shiraga founded the Zero Society group, which produced artwork that negated the status quo of the orthodox art system, based on the belief that all art arises from nothing. Before joining Jiro Yoshihara’s Gutai group (see AAP 41) with a few other Zero Society members in 1955, Shiraga started to experiment with unorthodox painting methods that could express his intuitive energy. Eschewing the paintbrush—the control of which had become second nature to him due to his thorough training in Nihonga (Japanese-style painting)—he first used his fingers, then shifted to his feet.

Shiraga’s foot painting immediately attracted attention and his famous works are grotesquely violent in their heavy layers of paint, often times in vivid colors against subtle grounds. In Wild Boar Hunting (1963), bright red splashes against earth tones conjure the image of a freshly killed animal in the underbrush. Closely related to his foot painting, Shiraga’s performance works also focused on the body as an art-making tool. In Challenging Mud, performed at the press preview of the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition at Ohara Kaikan Hall in Tokyo in 1955, Shiraga thrashed around in a mud pit, literally engaged in a battle with nature itself. Struggling with both paint and mud, Shiraga challenged not only the conventions of the art establishment, but also made a marked statement on the postwar condition of Japan, which was engaged in its own battle to recover from the political and physical scars of World War II.

In 1971, Shiraga became a monk of the Tendai Buddhist sect after training on sacred Mount Hiei, but he continued to paint. Except for a brief period in the 1960s when he used a piece of wood to sweep paint on the canvas, Shiraga consistently practiced foot painting through his later years. In the 1990s, after his inclusion in numerous important international exhibitions, including “Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994 and “Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1999, renewed interest in Shiraga’s remarkable style once again thrust him into the limelight. In recent years, his paintings have garnered high prices at contemporary art auctions in the US and Europe. His work has been collected by major institutions in Japan, the US and Europe, with many seminal works housed at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Hyogo Prefecture, which houses an important Gutai archive. Kazuo Shiraga is survived by his wife, the artist Fujiko Shiraga, an early member of the Gutai group.