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Since last month, Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino is on show at Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York. The exhibition will place legendary Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga in dialogue with ceramic master Satoru Hoshino. Fifteen of Shiraga’s abstract paintings made between the 1960s through the 2000s will be juxtaposed against a series by Hoshino from the 1990s. Although the two artists were near contemporaries, they never met. Yet, their distinct approaches to materiality and corporeality created radical and poetic work that shaped the landscape of Japanese postwar art.
Shiraga’s emphasis on body and matter in art is epitomised by his sensational 1955 performance Challenging Mud, in which he used his entire body to aggressively manipulate a plot of mud, enacting a struggle between the human body and matter. This canonical performance emerged out of the artist’s foot painting practice, which he developed to express himself more concretely and ground his art in materiality. Shiraga would set a canvas on the floor of his studio and, suspending his body from the ceiling, use his feet to paint powerful and energetic abstract forms. The artist continued to paint in this manner for the majority of his career, and this exhibition will include these foot paintings.
Similarly, Hoshino’s ceramics explore the visceral and non-hierarchical relationship between the body of the artist and matter. A prominent member of the avant-garde postwar Japanese ceramics group Sodeisha, the “Crawling through Mud Association,” from 1974 to 1980, Hoshino, along with fellow members of the group, questioned virtually all the conventions of ceramic materials, form, decoration, and function, and addressed broader issues of presentation, social hierarchy, and the political role of art. Experiencing fresh revelations about the physicality and force of his material after a landslide destroyed his studio in 1986, Hoshino was inspired to work in a less controlled manner. Hoshino roughly shapes his sculptures by prodding and pushing clay with his fingers, a technique that allows clay to form without any aesthetic preconceptions and the artist’s intervention in the traditional sense.
by Louise Lui
Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino will run until April 11, 2015 at Dominique Lévy Gallery, 909 Madison Avenue, New York City