Editing Chiken-sei kendoshin, 1961

* Kazuo Shiraga is widely celebrated for his unique method of swinging from a rope while painting visually striking abstractions with his feet, and was one of the founders of the influential Gutai art movement in Japan.
* The Painting is an excellent example from Kazuo Shiraga’s seminal body of work, the “Water Margin” series, and created in the artist’s unique physical style.
* Works from the “Water Margin” series rank among the artist’s most valuable and account for six of his top ten auction records. Top auction sales from the series are led by Tentaisei Soushiko (1960) which sold for $8,638,167 in December 2019 and Keishizoku (1961) which sold for $3,973,000 in November 2013.
* Shiraga’s top auction record is $10,285,492 for Takao (1959), which sold in June 2018. Early works from the Gutai period (1954-1972) such as Takao are most notable in the artist’s oeuvre.
* The artist was a central figure in “Gutai: Splendid Playground,” the Guggenheim Museum’s 2013 exhibition on the Gutai movement.
* Although there are no guarantees, similar works have appreciated at 24.2% annualized historically from 2003 to 2020.

[[File:Kazuo shiraga chiken-sei kendoshin082752.jpg]]

== Details ==

Kazuo Shiraga was one of the most influential Post-War Japanese artists, renowned for his integration of performance and painting.

The Painting is an excellent example of Kazuo Shiraga’s seminal body of work, the “Water Margin” series, known for heavily impastoed action paintings executed primarily in a rich palette of
deep reds, black and blues. The series began in
1959, when Shiraga broke with the dominant Gutai
practice of naming paintings simply as Sakuhin, or
“Work”, and began to title his works after the heroes
of the Water Margin, one of the great novels of
Chinese vernacular fiction. The Painting is titled after
Yù Băosì, a chivalrous outlaw nicknamed “Healthy
Star God of the Dangerous Road” for his commanding stature. The Painting was created in Shiraga’s
uniquely physical manner of execution, where the
artist steadied himself with a rope suspended above
a canvas slathered with oil paint directly from the
tube, painting using his feet with acrobatic gestures.
The majority of works from the series were created
between 1959 and 1965, predominantly in typical French canvas sizes measuring between 63 by
41 inches and 102 by 76 inches - within which the
Painting falls. The “Water Margin” series is regarded
as central to Shiraga’s oeuvre, and works from the
series rank among his most valuable and account
for six of his top ten auction records as of February 17, 2021. Top auction sales from the series are
led by Tentaisei Soushiko (1960) which sold for
$7,423,486 at Sotheby’s in Paris on December 4,
2019, Keishizoku (1961) which sold at Phillips in
New York for $3,973,000 on November 11, 2013,
and Chijikusei Gotenrai (1961) which sold at Ketterer
Kunst in Munich for €3,250,000 ($3,769,999).
The Painting’s dynamic, impastoed surface, rich
palette and date of execution make it an impressive work from Shiraga’s most desirable series.

In the later years of his life, Shiraga was recognized with numerous prestigious awards for his
contributions to Japanese art, including the Hyogo
Prefectural Cultural Prize for Excellence in 1987, the
Distinguished Service Medal for Culture in 1999,
and the Art Prize of Osaka City in 2002. Shiraga’s
work has been shown twice during the Venice Biennale: in 2007 at an adjacent exhibition organized
by Axel Vandervoot at the Palazzo Fortuny and
in 2009 as part of the Venice Biennale’s Arsenale
curated by Daniel Birnbaum. The artist has been
the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Kazuo Shiraga: Painting Born Out of Fighting”,
organized in 2009 by Azumino Municipal Museum
of Modern Art, which traveled around Japan to the
Amagasaki Cultural Center, the Yokosuka Museum
of Art and the Hekinan Museum of Contemporary
Art. Shiraga was a central figure in the Guggenheim’s 2013 in-depth exhibition dedicated to the
Gutai collective, and works by the artist have been
included in group exhibitions at renowned institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the
San Francisco Art Institute and the Dallas Museum
of Art. Kazuo Shiraga’s work is held in the permanent
collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York, the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre
Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis, among others. As of February 17, 2021, Shiraga’s auction records are led by
Takao (1959) which sold for at Sotheby’s in Paris on
June 6, 2018, for €8,731,400 ($10,285,492), Tentaisei
Soushiko (1960) which sold at Sotheby’s in Paris on
December 4, 2019, for €7,796,300 ($8,638,167) and
Gekidou Suru Aka (1969) which sold at Sotheby’s in
Paris on June 3, 2014, for €3,905,500 ($5,317,338).

Kazuo Shiraga (b. 1924, Amagasaki, Japan - d.
2008, Amagasaki, Japan) was an important
Japanese Post-War artist, best known as a major
figure of the Gutai movement. As a young artist,
Shiraga was encouraged by his father to attend
a Western-style painting club at the Amagasaki
Middle School, in which he enrolled in 1937. Four
years later, Shiraga began his studies at the Kyoto
Municipal Special School of Painting, with a concentration in “Nihonga,” a traditional style of Japanese
painting. Shiraga’s studies were paused from 1944
to 1945 when he was conscripted into the Imperial
Army during World War II. After the conclusion of the
war, Shiraga graduated from the School and continued his studies in oil painting at the City Art Center
in Osaka. The artist began his experimentation
with different painting techniques in 1953, when he
started painting with a palette knife and his hands,
and created his first paintings with his feet in 1954.
In 1955, Shiraga exhibited with the Gutai group, an
association of performative artists, for the first time
with his seminal performance piece, “Challenging
Mud,” where he physically moved through a pile of
mud in order to form shapes out of the clay with his
whole body. Thereafter, Shiraga began to focus on a
new method of painting, where he held on to a rope
above a canvas laid on the floor and swept paint
around its surface with his feet.
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