Untitled

With its dynamic profusion of painterly marks, Untitled, 1958 is an early work by Japanese artist Senkichiro Nasaka, executed shortly after he graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts. A classmate of Kazuo Shiraga, and later married to the artist Yuro Nasaka, he became a member of the influential Gutai movement in 1965. His practice was both painterly and performative: for the group’s 1970 show at the Osaka world fair, he designed a long aluminium pole that snaked through the gallery space playing music – an iconic work restaged at the Guggenheim Museum’s 2013 exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground. Untitled is emblematic of his early painterly language, informed by his interests in Japanese painting and European Art Informel, whilst simultaneously predating the kinetic, action-based approach that would come to be associated with Gutai.