Murakami Saburo

signed in Japanese and dated 1960 on the reverse, framed

Sakurado Fine Arts, Tokyo
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is generally in good condition with minor surface accretion. When examined under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Lines of Flight
Murakami Saburo

Murakami Saburo (1925-1996) was a founding 1st generation member of Gutai who created a highly diverse and conceptually explosive body of work. During the seminal Gutai outdoor exhibition “Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun” in 1956, an exhibition which went on for twenty-four hours a day for thirteen days, Murakami famously hurled himself repeatedly through numerous vertically erected paper screens. The dynamic and stunning performance constituted a critical attack on the picture plane as a two-dimensional surface and brought about a vividly physical iconography of architectural destruction into post-war representation. Ming Tiampo opines that Murakami “pushed Gutai’s challenge to the flat Abstract Expressionist canvas further than any of his peers […] transform[ing] canvas as limit into the canvas as threshold [and] opening the realm of painting to include time and space”.¹

The eminent French critic Pierre Restany would go on to cite Murakami’s iconic lacerated canvases as an example of the phenomenal Gutai performances that predated New York Happenings, writing of a “troubling coincidence: the ‘performers’ of New York Happenings would have a direct precursor in Japan”.² During those years Murakami also created a series of renowned paintings by throwing a ball soaked in ink at paper. Central to Murakami’s oeuvre is the element of chance born out of the relationship between one’s self and one’s subject, and the act of establishing this in the form of a work. Even after Gutai’s disbandment, Murakami went on to build a long and fascinating interdisciplinary oeuvre of performances, installations and paintings. Created in 1960, at the nascence of Gutai’s emergence into the international art scene, Untitled (Lot 802) is a rare early painting that encapsulates the ebullient energy and relentless innovation of Murakami’s phenomenal career.

¹ Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011, p. 25

² Refer to 1, p. 143