“Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino” Exhibition

Dominique Lévy Gallery

poster for “Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino” Exhibition
[Image: Kazuo Shiraga "Untitled" (1962) Oil on canvas, 35 13/16 × 45 11/16 in. Courtesy Amagasaki Cultural Center]

This event has ended.

Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino is curated by Koichi Kawasaki, former director of Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Japan. This exhibition places a group of 23 important abstract paintings made over the course of the fifty-year career of legendary Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga, in dialogue with a series of 9 works from the 1990s by Satoru Hoshino, a prominent member of the avant-garde postwar Japanese ceramics group Sodeisha, the “Crawling through Mud Association,” founded by Kazuo Yagi (1918-1979) in Kyoto. Body and Matter invites new insights into Shiraga’s extraordinary oeuvre through juxtaposition with the art of another Japanese master of a parallel universe: clay. Although they were near contemporaries in Japan, Shiraga (1924-2008) and Hoshino (b. 1945) never met. The exhibition at Dominique Lévy marks the first time their work will be shown in juxtaposition, tracing the thread of the informe—the “formless”—in the radical and poetic work of two great postwar Japanese figures who exploited different mediums and created fresh art-historical dialogue through their innovative approaches to matter and individuation.

On view through April 4, the exhibition coincides with Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga, also co-curated by Koichi Kawasaki with Gabriel Ritter, at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) in Dallas, Texas. Also devoted to advancing exploration into the contributions of Shiraga, Kawasaki’s DMA show is the first to pair his art side-by-side with that of fellow Gutai artist Motonaga.

Body and Matter will be accompanied by a fully illustrated hardbound book, released in Feburary 2015 and offering leading research and scholarship on the work of Shiraga via several newly commissioned essays by Koichi Kawasaki, John Rajchman, Ming Tiampo, and Reiko Tomii; personal accounts by Hoshino and Shiraga; philosophical and poetic texts relevant to the exhibition’s theme; and extensive archival material.

Dominique Lévy gallery will present a parallel program of events in New York during the course of the exhibition, including a panel discussion with Koichi Kawasaki, Alexandra Munroe, Ming Tiampo, and Reiko Tomii, moderated by Professor Rajchman, on February 12, 2015.

ABOUT THE PANEL PARTICIPANTS

Koichi Kawasaki
Independent art historian and curator
Curator of Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga

John Rajchman
Professor of Theory and Criticism, 20th-century Art and Philosophy
Columbia University
Author of The Deleuze Connections (The MIT Press, 2000)
Co-curator of the 30th Sao Paulo Biennial

Ming Tiampo
Associate Professor of Art History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Author of Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
Co-curator of Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2013)

Reiko Tomii
Independent art historian and curator
Publications include “Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades” (2009) and contributions to
“Yanagi Yukinori: Inujima Note” (2010) and “Xu Bing” (Albion Editions, 2011)
Co-founder of PoNJA-GenKon (Post-1945 Japanese Art Discussion Group / Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai)

Alexandra Munroe
Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Co-curator of Gutai: Splendid Playground (2013); Curator of Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity (2011), The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (2009), and Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe (2008)
Author of Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994)

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Schedule

from January 29, 2015 to April 04, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-01-29 from 18:00 to 20:00

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