Archives: Esibizioni

SHOZO SHIMAMOTO
A BERSAGLIO CON LA PITTURA

Curated by Martina Cavallarin
Co-curated by Antonio Caruso
Organised by Unlike Unconventional Events
Promoted by Associazione Le Colonne
Cultural Coordination by Christian Leo Comis
In partnership with Associazione Shozo Shimamoto and Fondazione Morra, Naples

Castello di Carovigno
5th of August – 29th of October 2023
Opening 4th of August, 6.00 – 9.00 p.m.

Introduction

On the occasion of the 2011 anthological exhibition dedicated to Shozo Shimamoto, a leading figure in international contemporary art as well as a member and founder of the Gutai Group, Achille Bonito Oliva stated “In his pictorial and performative works, Shozo Shimamoto uses distance to target shoot at painting, which is the real object of his creative process.” And SHOZO SHIMAMOTO, a bersaglio con la pittura is the chosen title to lead the visitor to experience the art works of the great Japanese artist, which are hosted for the first time in Puglia. The castle of Carovigno becomes a suggestive stage that puts the viewer in dialogue with Shozo Shimamoto’s installations, sculptures and paintings. The exhibition builds a scenic space where to search for details, to seek out special features, to let colours and shapes sink in, to bring back the free action of paint on the surface of existence founded on the totalising experience of Gutai art. Shimamoto’s poetic and artistic approach is both multicultural and interdisciplinary, it is subjective and intimate as much as it is relational and participatory.

SHOZO SHIMAMOTO, a bersaglio con la pittura is an event promoted by Le Colonne Association. Le Colonne is committed to the promotion and enhancement of the local artistic and cultural heritage and manager of the castle. It is directed and organised by Unlike Unconventional Events, which organises unconventional events, workshops, festivals, urban art, exhibitions and temporary shops. It is held in partnership with Fondazione Morra of Naples and Shozo Shimamoto Association. Based in the eighteenth-century Palazzo Spinelli di Tarsia in Naples, the Association’s aim is to promote and support Shozo Shimamoto’s artistic research through the publication of catalogues, videos and documentaries and the organisation of exhibitions and events.

The exhibition

The exhibition assumes the magical territory of the encounter between subjectivities, experiences and cultures. Symbol and heart of this turn is the emblematic platform. It invites the visitor to connect with Shimamoto’s artistic practice and physically perform an action by throwing bottles, which break on the ground and explode in colour – red, blue, green, yellow. On this artistic practice, taken up by Shimamoto since the very beginning of is research as a leitmotif of his entire production, Lorenzo Mango recalls in a text entitled “Per una forma libera del colore”: «[…] In 1957, Shimamoto would formulate this conviction in an article/manifesto with an emblematic title, Per una messa al bando del pennello, in which he argued that the “traditional” technique (of all traditions ideally united in the example of the Renaissance) had ended up mortifying the material and autonomously expressive quality of colour, bending it to purposes that were extraneous to its nature. “I believe,” he wrote, “that the first thing to do is to free colour from the brush. If in the process of creating one does not throw away the brush, there is no hope of emancipating colour”, which instead was what he set out to do by giving colour what belongs to colour, in other words, its being a material thing of light. Shimamoto’s transgressive act, his betrayal of technique and conventions could take totally eccentric paths in relation to painting, as we have seen in the examples just cited, but above all it became the hypothesis of a new painting practice strategy, which resulted in an alternative way of working with the brush. In 1956, for the first time, Shimamoto performed the action of throwing bottles filled with paint onto a canvas. It is a gesture that he will repeat countless times over the years and that still characterises the act of his “painting” today. With that gesture Shimamoto reacted to all possible forms of painting, to all constructed models of form. Throwing bottles filled with paint and making them explode against the surface of a canvas lying on the ground, the so-called “bottle crash”, determines an unpredictable situation, an event whose setting can be directed, planned, meditated upon and even planned, but which then, in the moment of its occurrence, is totally free. […]»
Shimamoto’s works selected for the exhibition cover a wide time frame, providing a dense and insightful synthesis of his artistic practice and conceptual poetics. The two platforms “Prego camminare sopra” date back to 1955; “A Weapon for Peace” from 2006 is an important acrylic on canvas; the four water paintings on felt “Felissimo” are from 2007; the two acrylic sculptures on plaster statue “Psiche di Capua” and “Venus” are from 2008. Also dating from 2008 are three imposing and colourful acrylics on canvas: “Punta Campanella 32”, “Ferretto 12”, “Ferretto 14”; dating from the following year is the series “Red”, presenting ten works reassembled as they were originally created for the performance.

This project activates an effective poetic of diachronic and synchronic sharing and exchange between different histories and distant geographies. SHOZO SHIMAMOTO, a bersaglio con la pittura is an exhibition of contemporary art that creates a new reality through the works on display. This reality is architected through experiments and elaborations of creative processes that move through the space and time of the exhibition and the time of the encounter between viewer and art work. The attempt is to develop a meeting place in which to question the rules of the game.

Curated by Martina Cavallarin
Co-curated by Antonio Caruso
Organised by Unlike Unconventional Events
Promoted by Associazione Le Colonne
Cultural Coordination by Christian Leo Comis
In partnership with Associazione Shozo Shimamoto and Fondazione Morra, Naples

Under the patronage of:
Comune di Carovigno
Dyaloghi, Università degli Studi di Padova

Thanks to the contribution of:
Never Before – Blum
Vilplastik
MAG Broker di assicurazioni
Villa Agreste, Ostuni
CANNEBIANCHE_ LIFESTYLE HOTEL, Fasano
Ingrame Tours
GH Dimora Sant’Anna, Carovigno

Castello di Carovigno
5th of August – 29th of October 2023
Opening 4th of August, 6.00 – 9.00 p.m.

unlike.events

www.castellodicarovigno.it

SHOZO SHIMAMOTO | MAJOR WORKS
Curated by Italo Tomassoni

Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea – CIAC | FOLIGNO
19th september 2021 > 1st may 2022

A wide-ranging retrospective dedicated to Japanese artist Shozo Shimamoto (1928 – 2013), curated by Italo Tomassoni, opens on 19 September at CIAC – Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea in Foligno, and runs until 1 May 2022.

The “SHOZO SHIMAMOTO/GRANDI OPERE” exhibition takes place in collaboration with the Fondazione Morra di Napoli, supported by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Foligno, with the technical, logistic, and organizational assistance of the Associazione Shozo Shimamoto.
The exhibition offers a detailed and comprehensive review of the Japanese artist’s career, from his first innovative experiments in the 1950s up to the more momentous and spectacular of the last years. In the 1950s, Shimamoto worked largely in the East and especially in Japan, but by the new millennium, he was working mainly in the West, performing many of his actions. The dialectic between these two phases in his output occurs within a unique and extraordinary artistic process. In the 1950s, he began exploring a new concept (and practice) in painting, working with gesture and paint marks, which later evolved into the ‘happening’. In particular, “[t]he power of the mark, that Shimamoto endows with the most authentic meaning of his message, conditions the fluctuation of the paths of written signs that never appear “closed”, developing freely in space, on the other hand, in search of unexplored passages driven by their inner dynamism” (Italo Tomassoni, from the presentation in the catalogue). Nevertheless, the large-scale events of recent years go beyond marks on canvas, favouring a sizeable theatrical edifice with their own dramatic and expressive autonomy, and taking place in public as a unique aesthetic event. For Shimamoto, the work “offers itself to the experience of the artist and the public as though spread out over time, on the infinite horizontality of liquid and multiple spatial displacements” (Tomassoni, ibid).

After a period of inactivity due to Covid-19, the Foligno Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea opens with an exhibition reflecting its global outlook through this retrospective of Shozo Shimamoto’s historically most significant works. The collection starts with Shimamoto’s earliest pieces from his time with the Gutai Group, moving on to Japanese calligraphy, and culminating with the explosions of colour that characterize his Italian works. The Grandi Opere chosen for this exhibition underline how Shimamoto’s most extraordinary creativity coincides with his use of large surfaces, a constitutive element in his work, denoting both total fullness and, at the same time, a boundary to be continually overcome using colour and matter.

Shimamoto’s large canvases on show at the CIAC take the viewer on a journey that starts with gesture and mark, moving on through colour and contending with matter until it penetrates the deepest and “other” meanings of form. Suspended between heaven and earth, Shimamoto’s artistic gesture creates through these works an empathy beyond time and space.