RESENTED BY WANGSIM

Wangsim is pleased to present Gutai: The Beginning, an online exhibition that explores the legacy of the historical art movement through masterworks by five of its founding members: Sadamasa Motonaga, Kazuo Shiraga, Shozo Shimamoto, Yozo Ukita and Jiro Yoshihara. The exhibition celebrates the Gutai Art Association – emerged in the mid-1950s in the creative void of a postwar Japan where the smothering sense of defeat mingles with old-school convention – and its effort to resolve the inherent contradictions between traditions of painting and the core tenets of a movement that called for experimentation, individuality, unexpected materials, and, perhaps above all, physical action and psychological freedom. Initially dismissed by Japanese critics as spectacle makers and labelled by the West as “mere followers of the Western approach”, the founding members of Gutai continued creating works which demonstrated a freewheeling relationship between art, body, space and time. The ideas of “play”, humor and celebration were emphasized; the curiosity was entertained.

The first generation of Gutai artists not only unveiled the first chapters of Japanese modern art, leaving a legacy which inspired generations of creative expression to come, they also collectively marked a radical beginning of the break-through of the myriad boundaries and the constraints of painting and: the beginning of the new artmaking (namely, to create unprecedented art or “art that has never existed before” – an early Gutai artists slogan).

View exhibition online or contact to see works in person