Background
Shozo Shimamoto was born in Osaka in 1928.
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嶋本 昭三
Shozo Shimamoto was born in Osaka in 1928.
Shozo Shimamoto attended Kansui Gakuin University and graduated in 1950. He went on to study with the artist Jiro Yoshihara.
Early in his career, while painting on newspaper, he accidentally punctured the surface — an entirely chance event that he would transform into a formal, repetitive operation. He began a career-long study of the violent encounter with the surface of the painting, primarily through the creation of holes and cuts. Painting in vivid color and forming abstract forms with irregularly patterned holes, Shimamoto found that his gestures left a record of the artist’s physical action and gave the image a performative element. He eventually expanded his practice into live performance, often staging the creation of his paintings for a live audience.
Shozo Shimamoto was one of the founders of Gutai movement together with Jiro Yoshihara, Akira Kanayama, Saburo Murakami, and Kazuo Shiraga. The movement developed in the Japanese Kansai region in 1954. In 1957 the Group created Gutai Stage Exhibition: it was the first time that a stage was used as a living artistic space in which works were shaped through colors shooting cannon, created by Shimamoto himself, in a performance enriched with sounds, helicopters, cranes and weapons.
Artistic performances were themselves part of art exhibitions and some of Shimamoto's sound works, predicting Cage's “Fluxus” work, were purchased by Centre Pompidou in Paris and by the City Museum in Ashiya. During the Sixties, Shimamoto attended with his works several exhibitions regarding the Gutai movement in the most important Galleries in the world. Gutai artists were discovered by the art critic Michel Tapi. He described the Group linking it to French Movements of Informal Art and Tachisme.
In 1972 the Group broke up and Shimamoto showed his interests for Mail Art and Networking Art developing a personal and particular idea of the artist and the artwork. The latter was the result of a social and collective work which reflected a precise plan: every time he met an artist he invited him to express himself with brushes, canvases, and colors. Shimamoto used to take pictures during the artist's performance.
Shimamoto also used to realize enormous canvases. For example, in 1990, at the Modern Art National Gallery in Rome, he realized the same performance made during the Second Exhibition at Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo but with new meanings and means. Shimamoto asked to his mail artist friends to put in the bottles full of colors some little objects like shells, grains of rice and sand, to use them in his artworks. The result was really peculiar and original.
During the 80s and 90s he realized a lot of performances between Europe and USA. In 1993 the Group was invited to Biennale di Venezia. In 1994 Alexandra Munroe, curator of the exhibition “The Japanese art after 1945: scream against the sky” at New York Guggenheim Museum, discovered that Shimamoto's holes were performed in 1950 and that Shimamoto preceded Lucio Fontana's famous creations. This discover brought a renewed interest for Shimamoto's works, since then mentioned in artistic manuals and encyclopedias.
In 1999 he attended the 48th Biennale di Venezia together with David Bowes and Yoko Ono and in 2003 he came back to the 50th Biennale di Venezia with the initiative Brain Academy Apartment. In Venice, in 2004, he realized a performance with the helicopter. In May 2006 the Morra Foundation hosted a Shimamoto's personal exhibition in Naples; the event began with an opening performance in the renowned Dante Square.
In 2007 Shimamoto participated again at Biennale di Venezia and took part in the Art Challenged Project organizing an event in Beijing for disabled artists. During his last years he was involved in a teaching project at Kyoto University of Education and he was a President of the Tkarazuka University of Art and Design and of the Disabled Artists Japanese Association. Shimamoto’s works can be found in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe, and many others. He died on January 25, 2013 in Osaka, Japan.
In 1996, after his meeting with Bern Porter, creator of the bomb destroying Hiroshima, and because of his constant pacific activity against atomic bombs, Shozo Shimamoto was proposed as candidate for the Peace Nobel Prize. In 1998 he was chosen among the world four best artists in the afterwar era together with Jackson Pollock, John Cage, and Lucio Fontana for an exhibition at MOCA in Los Angeles. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has noted him as one of the most daring and independent experimentalists of the postwar international art scene in the 1950s. Internationally today he is especially noted for his work in the "mail art" genre, of which he was a pioneer.
Shimamoto’s diverse body of work that dates from the Gutai period (1954 - 1971), and after, often integrates the bodily involvement of both artist and viewer, while transforming the conventional descriptions of the fields of painting and sculpture. His action-based painting style was the Eastern, independently born answer to some of the key artistic developments in the post-war American art scene, such as Jackson Pollock’s “Abstract Expressionism” and Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings.”
Shozo Shimamoto was one of the founders of Gutai movement.
