Shozo Shimamoto Biography
Shōzō Shimamoto (Osaka, 22 January 1928 – 25 January 2013) was a Japanese contemporary artist. He was a member of the avant-garde Gutai movement, founded in the 1950s. His works are in collections at museums such as the Tate Gallery and Tate Modern (in London and Liverpool) and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe, Japan. New York Times critic Roberta Smith called him one of the boldest and most independent experimenters of the postwar art scene in the 1950s. Also internationally known in the "Mail Art" circuit, of which he was a pioneer. "Shimamoto contributed greatly to renewing the very strong tradition of Japanese art in light of the events in the new post-war and post-atomic bomb dimension. With the other members of the Movement, Shimamoto subverted the idea that everyone had of Japanese floral art and decorative, thus creating a completely new figurative culture. After all, it is a word that in Japanese means conflict between matter and spirit, and Gutai has, in fact, produced a break with spiritual art by introducing the aspect of matter into the relationship. with the torn dimension of the times through the strong fracture with tradition and it could not have been different after Hiroshima and Nagasaki". "Shimamoto created a new two-dimensional spatiality through "cannon fire", dripping, cuts and holes in the canvas. In 1954 in Osaka, the Japanese artist was a dynamic member of the avant-garde Gutai movement, founded by Jiro Yoshihara, and he advocated an unscrupulous use of materials, emphasizing the gesture and the artistic event to the point of bordering on spectacularity, thus anticipating the ritual of happenings in the Sixties. Shimamoto moved from Holes to Informal art with extreme naturalness to Body Art, from performance to photography.
