Experience Matters. Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino at Dominique Lévy New York

Gutai, which translates as “embodiment” or “concrete”, is most commonly understood in the West as the name of the avant-garde art group that was formed in 1954. The Dominique Lévy gallery in New York City is currently exhibiting Body and Matter, a show which pairs the bodily yet sensitive work of the two important Gutai artists Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino.

The exhibition, which has not been installed chronologically, pairs the two artists whose work is considerably different but both have an almost chaotic quality and concern with the senses. Coming after WWII the pieces seem to deal with life and action after trauma. As John Rajchman noted in his essay for the shows catalog, the works are kind of “materialized sensations.”

Installation view of Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino
2015

Satoru Hoshino’s ceramic sculptures were created with the near violent act of literally wrestling with clay. With his practice the artist uses the “creative act” to express his ideas and experiences by theatrically giving them form. In this way we can say that Hoshino uses the organic material to express the primal experience of embodiment and life in an uneasy world.

Kazuo Shiraga’s paintings were not created with such physically intense means, but are still concerned with the body. Made with lumps and thick layers of paint, the pictures have the air of something like flesh. These works seek to “to destroy or re-create what is defined as an abstract picture” and bring the ‘figure’ into space. The work on view in Body and Matter does not forego lived and sensory experience in favor of intellect but as Jirō Yoshihara wrote in the “Gutai Manifesto” this art “does not alter matter, it imparts new life to matter.”