Sadamasa Motonaga

Sadamasa Motonaga (元永定正, Motonaga Sadamasa, born November, 26, 1922, in Iga Ueno, died October 3, 2011, in Takarazuka) was a Japanese visual artist and book illustrator, and a first-generation member of the postwar Japanese artist group Gutai Art Association, Gutai for short.

Motonaga’s oeuvre, comprising paintings, objects, performances and stage art, ceramics, murals and installation artworks and picture books, is characterized by his humorous, enlivening (animating) use of biomorphic abstract shapes inspired by nature and manga cartoons, as well as the exploration of the materiality of color.

Born in Ueno (Mie Prefecture) in 1922 into a middle-class family, Motonaga, at an early age, aspired to become a manga cartoon artist.

As a young adult he worked as a national railway employee and as a postal clerk while continuing to submit comic strips to magazines.

In 1944, he began to study painting with Ueno-based painter Mankichi Hamabe.

After the end of the Asian Pacific War, during which he worked for a munitions plant, Motonaga resumed painting and engaged in the local art scene in the Hanshin region.

Promoted by the French art critic Michel Tapié, who during the 1950s and 1960s attempted to establish Informel as a global movement, Motonaga became one of the few Gutai members who received international and national recognition as a solo artist beyond the Gutai context.

He began taking sketching and oil painting classes at the nearby Nishinomiya Art School, after relocating to Kobe-Uozaki in 1952, and in 1953 he began participating in the Ashiya City Art Association’s annual exhibitions.

He is most known for his ephemeral works from Gutai’s experimental exhibition projects, such as Liquid: Red and Works (Water) from 1955 and 1956, which used vinyl sheets and tubes filled with color-tinted water; his stage works from 1957 and 1958, which involved smoke as artistic material; and for his Informel-style paintings from the late 1950s that experimented with pouring liquid paint on to canvases.

His early humorous biomorphic abstract paintings and objects made of everyday household materials were praised by the Association’s founding member and juror Jirō Yoshihara, who invited him in 1955 to join the Gutai Art Association (commonly known as Gutai), recently founded under his tutelage.

Like many other Gutai members, Motonaga continued to participate in the Ashiya City Art Exhibitions.

As a member of Gutai, Motonaga participated in most of the group’s exhibitions and projects, such as the Gutai journal, outdoor exhibitions, and stage shows, which resulted in a great number of radically experimental performances, paintings, and interactive installation works by the members.

Motonaga continued to create humorous biomorphic abstract paintings and objects made of natural found objects that he covered with brightly colored paint, such as a group of stones covered with bright red, white and blue paint and adorned with wheat straws.

For Gutai’s Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Summer Sun (1955), the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition (1955), and the Gutai Outdoor Art Exhibition (1956), Motonaga filled vinyl tubes with color-tinted water, which were hung from the trees or from the ceiling of the exhibition venues.

At the Gutai Art on the Stage show in 1957, Motonaga publicly staged his performance Smoke, in which rings of smoke were blown out a wooden box into the air.

Around 1957, Motonaga began to experiment with pouring liquid paint onto wet layers of paint, inspired by the tarashikomi technique in traditional Japanese painting.

Motonaga used the dynamic and uncontrolled effects of this method in combination with his simple, biomorphic shapes, letting the paint overflow the contours of shapes and often applying Pebbles to the canvas.

Due to the apparent spontaneous gesturality of this method, Motonaga’s pouring paintings resonated with the Informel craze in Japan.

In 1957, Gutai began collaborating with the French art critic Michel Tapié, who was promoting Informel and gestural abstract art as a global movement.

At the 2nd Gutai Art on the Stage show in 1958, he combined the two, blowing the smoke into a giant vinyl tube.

He received an award at the 11th Premio Lissone Internazionale per la Pittura in 1959 and held his first solo show abroad at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1961.

At the same time he also gave his first solo exhibition within Japan at the influential Tokyo Gallery.

His works were included in most major international exhibitions of contemporary Japanese painting during this period.

Motonaga was an influential member of Gutai, and his works were a fixture for Gutai; he also recruited so-called second and third generation Gutai members.

In 1960, Motonaga was one of only a few members of the group to close a contract with the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York (whom Tapié advised) to provide paintings on a regular basis.

Motonaga became recognized both nationally as well as internationally as an artist of his own, beyond Gutai, also via Tapié’s networks.

He was offered a yearlong residency by the Japan Society in New York in 1966, during which he introduced airbrushing and a hard-edge style to his paintings.

In 1966, Motonaga moved to New York to take part in a Japan Society’s residency program, joined by his partner Etsuko Nakatsuji, whom he had met in 1957 and lived with in Takarazuka since 1962.

During this almost year-long stay, he was introduced to New York’s art scene and befriended the Japanese translator, poet, and writer Shuntarō Tanikawa, a fellow invitee, who was also living at the Chelsea Hotel, as well as other Japanese New York-based artists such as Tadanori Yokoo, Yūji Takahashi and Toshi Ichiyanagi.

While there, he explored new materials, techniques and styles in his painting, such as emulsion paints, spray-paint, airbrushing, and Liquitex acrylic paint.

Back in Japan, Motonaga continued to show his works in Gutai exhibitions and contributed to the group’s exhibition and performances at the Expo ’70 in Osaka, where he conceived several acts for the stage show Gutai Art Festival that used the effects of light and reflection of moving forms.

The children's picture books, which Motonaga created in collaboration with the poet and translator Shuntarō Tanikawa beginning in 1970, became bestselling books.

Motonaga continued to hold solo and group exhibitions throughout the 1970s, particularly in art spaces in the Kansai region.

He expanded the range of his artistic production to ceramics, home furnishings (e.g. tapestries and chairs), murals, and installation artworks, which often included performative elements.

He also began publishing picture books in collaboration with Tanikawa, who contributed onomatopoeic verses, while Motonaga provided illustrations with organic growth and movement of shapes as theme.

After leaving Gutai in 1971, Motonaga’s work again expanded beyond painting to ceramics, interior design, murals, and public performances and installation artworks, all of which he continuously developed around his signature-style of animated biomorphic shapes.

Tired of quarrels between the members, Motonaga quit Gutai in 1971, only a few months before the group officially disbanded in the aftermath of Yoshihara’s death in 1972.

In the 1980s, Motonaga’s works were included in the increasing number of retrospective Gutai exhibitions in Europe, US, and Japan, for which the artist made reproductions of his early works, specifically his Water/Liquid works.

His new works, however, turned from a hard-edge pop style painting towards a mixed language of plain graphic sign-like elements and design with painting elements.

He was married to graphic designer Etsuko Nakatsuji, with whom he also collaborated on reconstruction projects in the aftermath of the Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995.