/ Shozo Shimamoto：Across The Borderlands of Art

“More than anything else, I find stimulation in the materialization of an unpredictable expression. The biggest meaning of this phenomenon might just be Zen.”－Shozo Shimamoto

The Gutai group was founded in 1954 as a moment of synthesis of ferments that cross the post-war Japanese art. Central figure of this process is Jiro Yoshihara, a painter and most of all a cultural animator, who brings together the most vital young forces of Japanese painting. Shozo Shimamoto is one of the founders of the group: indeed he is the one who baptizes it with a term, Gutai, which loosely means concreteness, in opposition to abstraction. The group of young artists led by the master initiates a process of radical rethinking of the artistic and pictorial tradition in particular, having as reference the informal practices but also forcing them in a direction of cancellation and annihilation. The group thus enters into relation with the western avant-gardes, and in many cases turns to be a precursor of many experiences carried out by European and American artists years later. The case of Shozo Shimamoto is emblematic from this point of view, because he is among the first, in the fifties, to betray the painting in the name of something else, in the name of a pictorial event.

This presentation of works by Shozo Shimamoto, carried out with the cooperation of the Shozo Shimamoto Association & the Morra Foundation, Naples, Italy, which features in its collection the largest collection of the works by the Japanese artist, consists in three different types of works, to give to see the evolution and the process of Shimamoto art from the early times until the last part of his life where he performed the most spectacular performances in Italy organized by the Morra Foundation, one of the very first pioneer art centre dedicated to the performing visual arts.

This is an attempt, for this special presentation, to bring back the oeuvre as it was initially thought; to get back together the multiple scattered pieces of an enormous black and white canvas, and give to the spectator a suggestion of resemblance to the original magnitude and scale of Shozo Shimamoto’s endeavour. A large selection of paintings are presented here, starting by the beautiful Nyotaku series, and followed by the most famous series of monochroms and bottle crash paintings, coming from the legendary public performances of the Gutai leader.

Finally will be presented a work on film which is an extraordinary experience of anticipation of the American avant-gardes. This seven minutes experiments sees Shimamoto, already during the Fifties, acting manually on the film, adding colour to the photograms and even manipulating them until partial breakage. These features make this a very special piece as it is a powerful precursor of western experimental film masters who started manual film modifications several years later.