Yasuo Sumi Biography
Born in 1925, master Yasuo Sumi lived in the city of Itami, near Osaka in southern Japan. In the mid-1950s, his training as an abstract artist took a decisive turn when Shozo Shimamoto, fascinated by his natural vocation for a wild and "dirty" use of colour, involved him in the Gutai painters' movement, founded in 1954 by Shimamoto himself and by the pioneer of Japanese abstract art Jiro Yoshihara. Sumi officially joined the Gutai Group in July 1955 when she participated in the "1st Open Air Exhibition" organized by the artists in the city of Ashiya. In the immediately following season, while the Gutai Group was recognized both in Europe and in America as a privileged interlocutor of Action Painting and an autonomous antecedent of new Western experiences such as happenings and performances, Sumi joined all the group's initiatives, developing ever deeper his idea of art as a direct expression of natural vitality through color and action. His dense and disharmonious paintings were soon recognized in all their instinctive and spontaneous originality, in the wake of some important judgments expressed by Jiro Yoshihara himself, who cited Sumi among the protagonists of the Group in all his theoretical interventions published between the 1950s and Sixty in the Gutai Bulletin, starting from the founding Manifesto of Gutai art of December 1956 (published in the magazine Geijutsu shincho) where Sumi is cited for the originality of his painting using a vibrator to frantically spread the color on the canvas. From the early Sixties there are also some important experiences of Art and Theater (one of the most original lines of Gutai research) in which Sumi goes on stage inside a vinyl box throwing paints diluted in water against the walls and spreading on himself . After the dissolution of the Gutai Group in 1972 following the death of Yoshihara, master Sumi continued his artistic research in active dialogue on the one hand with the other great protagonist of the Gutai Shozo Shimamoto, and on the other with the currents of young artists contemporaries who drew inspiration from Gutai, starting with the AU (Art Unidentified) Group of which he was a member and prominent exponent.
