Ushio Shinohara

"Sparrow, " Acrylic Paint on Canvas - Abstract Boxing Painting

2018

Bright, vivid, and highly saturated colors in combination with a furious treatment of the medium compel this work to stand out as an iconic blend of passion and poise. Born in Tokyo in 1932, Ushio Shinohara (nicknamed "Gyu-chan"), is a Japanese Neo-Dadaist artist who has lived and worked in the United States since 1969. He is well known for his boxing paintings, which are made by dipping a pair of custom made boxing gloves into paint and unleashing his fists onto swathes of un-stretched canvas. Ushio works in several mediums including painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture. In 1960 Ushio helped found the Neo-Dadaism Organizers. Their mission: deviate from any conventional form of art. Akin to European Dadaists, who’s art sought to reveal the customary and often repressive conventions of logical order and rationality, the Neo-Dadaism Organizers embodied a similar ethos. This can chiefly be seen in akushon, meaning “action”, which is the practice of emphasizing the human body as an artistic medium. For Ushio, this sensibility is encapsulated in what has become his personal trinity “be speedy, beautiful, and rhythmical.” Ushio's bright and frequently oversized work has exhibited at prestigious institutions internationally, including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art; Centre Georges Pompidou; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Japan Society, New York; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Busan; the Dallas Museum of Art and the Tate Modern, among others. His work was included in International Pop, a landmark exhibition at the Walker Art Center that chronicles the global emergence of Pop art from the 1950s through the early 1970. In addition to an extensive exhibition history, Ushio has also been a prolific performer — demonstrating the process of his boxing paintings live and in-person at various institutions. A selection of these performances include the National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Austria Museum of Applied Art, Vienna; Busan Art Museum, South Korea; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; The State University of New York at Potsdam; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; and Carlton University, Ottawa. Ushio Shinohara "Trapeze Artists...

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