Tetsumi Kudo

In his wide-ranging practice, Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo promoted environmental awareness through found object assemblages, reminiscent of gardens, and cubes that seemed to contain vast inner worlds in states of metamorphosis. A staunch antimodernist, he freely sampled abject imagery, like feces, eyeballs, breasts, and penises, presented in combination with household objects, transistors, and early electronics, to criticize the rampant consumerism of the postwar recovery. Kudo, who was an early proponent of performance-based painting, was an important figure of Tokyo’s “Anti-Art” movement before relocating to Paris in 1962, where he gained recognition for the Happenings he staged and began making art in the vein of Nouveau Réalisme. His lasting legacy can be traced in such artists as Paul McCarthy and Takashi Murakami, who once called him “the father of us all.”