Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo
Acquired from the above by the present owner

This work is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity issued by Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd. 

New beauty always comes in strange forms. It is not enough to merely imitate something from nature but to actually create it.

Sadamasa Motonaga


Executed in 1964, Work epitomises the strange magnificent worlds Sadamasa Motonaga created during his pivotal early Gutai period from the 1950s to mid-1960s. Evoking cosmic planets, quiet riverbeds and searing volcanic magma, this iconic and idiosyncratic aesthetic involve a specific method in which the artist laid his canvases on the floor and tilted them in different angles to allow poured mixtures of pigment, resin and enamel to “flow” and “pool” in different speeds and textures according to viscosity and gravity. The rich primary colours streamed in organic rivulets and coalesce in bulb-shaped embryonic forms, resulting in mesmerising compositions that seem to divulge secrets of some primitive life force. His pioneering method, developed in parallel to American painter Morris Louis’s Veil paintings, is an avant-garde take on the traditional Japanese technique tarashikomi (“dripping”) which involves applying different coloured paints one upon another before the pigment is fully dry to achieve a rippling effect. While tarashikomi was traditionally employed as a means of decoration, Motonaga’s method was a rigorous conceptual investigation – that of the delicate balance between intention and intuition, control and chance, accident and calculated manoeuvre. The artist states: “I consciously used this approach as a way of entrust[ing] it to the power of nature” (Motonaga Sadamasa in an interview conducted by Shin'ichiro Osaki and Tokutaro Yamamura, August 21, 1985).

Motonaga’s preoccupation with the intrinsic artistic properties of nature extended beyond activities the canvas and earned him early acclaim in Gutai’s debut exhibition “The Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Summer Sun” in 1955. In a pine grove park in Ashiya, Motonaga strung liquid-filled vinyl tubes and sheets on trees, creating an ethereal ‘light’ installation that sparkled as the water shapes caught rays from the sun. Gutai leader Jirō Yoshihara immediately and rightfully declared it “the world’s first water sculpture”, and in 2011 the Guggenheim commissioned the artist to recreate the iconic work for the museum rotunda (Work [Water], 1956/2011). In 1956, Motonaga staged a performance for Life magazine in which he funnelled smoke through a large metallic box, tapping the reverse of the box to create rings of smoke lit up by coloured lights. The common theme observed from these early experiments is a desire to “capture” or “encapsulate” formless elements from nature – in so doing allowing and nurturing the rebirth of organic form and texture. Such authentic and “concrete” engagements with material and matter form the critical precursors to the artist’s ensuing pouring technique.

Notably, although Motonaga’s pioneering technique developed concurrently with Louis’s Veil paintings that similarly employed gravity-pulled streams of colour, Motonaga was not at all concerned with the flatness of the picture plane but instead with giving life to paint. Both artists dispensed with Abstract Expressionism’s gestural stroke and allowed paint to flow without interference of brush or gesture; however, Motonaga’s intense hues, palpable tactility and organic forms contrasted starkly with Louis’s uniform bands of translucence superimposed colour. Central to Motonaga’s method is his intention to awaken the life of paint through nature; in his own words, his pouring method allowed him “to tap into the power of nature and create works that transcended [his] own thoughts”. The resulting creations mirror the natural processes of rivers and lakes that carry residue or matter across its surface. He explains: “If you stream the paint slowly, you can create a stream like a river on the surface of the canvas… With a river, after the rain stops and the sky clears, the water also clears up, and deposits of sand create beautiful patterns in the riverbed. I’m doing the same thing with paint” (Ibid).

In 1966, two years after creating the present work, Motonaga travelled to New York and mastered techniques in airbrush and spray painting. From then on, his aesthetic shifted towards hard-edged tumescent shapes rendered in saturated hues and polished colour gradations. While drastically different in aesthetic, these late paintings carved out a distinctive universe of their own and are a continuation of the artist’s acclaimed lifelong ruminations on fluidity versus concreteness, intuition versus control, and the life of matter.