1/2/2011
Sadaharu Horio
Frankfurt LAB, Frankfurt
As a member of the legendary avant-garde group Gutai, the Japanese artist Sadaharu Horio has been working with the topic Atarimae-no-koto (A matter of course) for many years. With approximately one hundred exhibitions, actions, and performances per year, Horio represents an influential position within the Japanese contemporary art scene.
Curated by Daniel Birnbaum, William Forsythe, Nikolaus Hirsch
As a member of the legendary avant-garde group Gutai, the Japanese artist Sadaharu Horio (born 1939 in Kobe, Japan) has been working with the topic Atarimae-no-koto ("A matter of course") for many years. With approximately one hundred exhibitions, actions, and performances per year, Horio represents an influential position within the Japanese contemporary art scene. However, up until now, Horio's work has had only a modest presence in western exhibition contexts. In 2003, together with around forty artist friends, he founded the group KUKI ("air"), whose members execute projects with him at respective locations.
Gutai was a movement that originated in 1954, and, in the western art world, reactions to it ranged from sniggers to outright criticism. If the goal was, according to the manifesto, "to lift abstract art into a new sphere and celebrate pure artistic creation," then this should be, even today, understood literally as concrete instructions to be applied to Gutai's diverse actions, paintings, sculptures, exhibitions, and installations in public parks and shopping malls. Gutai purposely turned away from traditional artistic production, in an attempt to remain undefined and defying categorization. The Japanese artists demonstrated a lightness which is evident in the current work of the individual Gutai artists.
Sadaharu Horio was a member of Gutai from 1966 until its breakup in 1972. In the context of the Frankfurt Positionen 2011, he will develop an object which could be simply described as folded paper. Together with assistants from his team KUKI, Horio publicly presents the process of creating the object over the course of five days. The artwork gradually emerges from a succession of performances without previously determined steps, which remain in relationship with the space and its conditions. The individual stages of development, from the folding of paper in large format to the experimental forms of paint application, are made visible to the public.
Coordinator: Jule Hillgärtner, Julian Gabriel Richter
Press Contact ATARIMAE-NO-KOTO: jule.hillgaertner@staedelschule.de
Image: photo by Geneviève Haraguchi
Opening: Wed 02/02/2011, 7-9 pm
FRANKFURT LAB
Schmidtstraße 12, 60326 Frankfurt/Main