Shozo Shimamoto, born in Osaka

Osaka

is a city in the Kansai region of Japan's main island of Honshu, a designated city under the Local Autonomy Law, the capital city of Osaka Prefecture and also the biggest part of Keihanshin area, which is represented by three major cities of Japan, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe...

 in 1928, is a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese artist. He was an early member of the avant garde Gutai group

Gutai group

The Gutai group was an artistic movement and association of artists founded by Jiro Yoshihara in Japan in 1954...

 founded in the 1950s, and his works are in museum collections such as those of the Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

 and the Tate Modern

Tate Modern

Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...

 (in both London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 and Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

) and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe, Japan. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith

Roberta Smith

Roberta Smith is an art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art.Born in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Smith studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her career in the arts started in 1968 while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in...

 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E5DD1E3BF936A35757C0A96E958260 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

Mail art

Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...

" genre, of which he was a pioneer.

External links

• Tate Collection, UK information on Shimamoto, with images of works in Tate collection
• French page on Gutaj group with information on Shimamoto
• New York Times article by art critic Roberta Smith: "ART VIEW; When Art Became a Stage and Artists Actors" (April 5, 1998). She names Shimamoto as among the most daring experimentalists on the international art scene:

"Perhaps driven by the exhilarating mixture of relief, freedom and despair that followed the end of World War II, artists around the world had been experimenting with newly physical, sometimes violent, cathartic ways of making paintings and sculptures. Others were also staging what they called events, or actions or performances that sometimes were as destructive as they were creative....

"Some of these artists were doubtlessly influenced by Pollock's example... But the same year brought independent experiments: Lucio Fontana

Lucio Fontana

Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.-Early life:...

, for example, was in Argentina (or Italy), making images by repeatedly puncturing or slashing painted canvases with knives. And in Japan, Shozo Shimamoto was symbolically penetrating the sacrosanct picture plane of painting by throwing himself through several layers of rice paper, leaving traces of the event -- the hole surrounded by jagged shards of paper -- as the work of art."

• Shozo Shimamoto: Official site
• Askart.com pages on Shimamoto, including color images of the work
• A tribute to Shimamoto with photos, an interview written in italian and texts by Tapié and Achille Bonito Oliva