New York, NY. Beginning today, January 29, 2015, Dominique Lévy Gallery will present Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino. This exhibition places a group of more than 15 important abstract paintings made over the course of the fifty-year career of legendary Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga, in dialogue with a series of works from the 1990s by Satoru Hoshino, a prominent member of the avant-garde postwar Japanese ceramics group Sodeisha, the "Crawling through Mud Association," founded by Kazuo Yagi (1918-1979) in Kyoto. Body and Matter invites new insights into Shiraga's extraordinary oeuvre through juxtaposition with the art of another Japanese master of a parallel universe: clay. Although they were near contemporaries in Japan, Shiraga (1924-2008) and Hoshino (b. 1945) never met. The exhibition at Dominique Lévy marks the first time their work will be shown in juxtaposition, tracing the thread of the informe-the "formless"-in the radical and poetic work of two great postwar Japanese figures who exploited different mediums and created fresh art-historical dialogue through their innovative approaches to matter and individuation.
Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino is curated by Koichi Kawasaki, former director of Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Japan. On view through April 11, the exhibition coincides with Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga, also curated by Koichi Kawasaki, on view at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) in Dallas, Texas. Also devoted to advancing exploration into the contributions of Shiraga, Kawasaki's DMA show is the first to pair his art side-by-side with that of fellow Gutai artist Motonaga.Body and Matter will be accompanied by a fully illustrated hardbound book, released in Feburary 2015 and offering leading research and scholarship on the work of Shiraga via several newly commissioned essays by Koichi Kawasaki, John Rajchman, Ming Tiampo, and Reiko Tomii; personal accounts by Hoshino and Shiraga; philosophical and poetic texts relevant to the exhibition's theme; and extensive archival material.Videos