From the Catalogue:
Water, and all its permutations, lies at the core of Sadamasa Motonaga’s oeuvre: …
Sadamasa Motonaga is an abstract painter best known for his involvement in the Gutai Group. Motonaga graduated from trade school; with aspirations to be a manga artist, he began to make figural and landscape works on canvas under the tutelage of painter Mankichi Hamabe. In 1952, he began to make abstract objects and paintings, which garnered him an invitation to join the Gutai exhibitions. One of his most famous works was a site-specific installation with pools of colored water suspended in vinyl tubes hanging from trees. From then, he experimented with water and smoke as ephemeral artistic materials. Inspired in part by tarashikomi techniques in traditional Japanese painting, he began to make paintings generated by chance, tilting canvases and pooling paint.
From the Catalogue:
Water, and all its permutations, lies at the core of Sadamasa Motonaga’s oeuvre: a body of works that has continually sought to render a fluid substance as a concrete one—an apt distillation of the Gutai group’s titular concern: ‘concreteness’.
Motonaga was one of the Gutai group’s most …
Sadamasa Motonaga is an abstract painter best known for his involvement in the Gutai Group. Motonaga graduated from trade school; with aspirations to be a manga artist, he began to make figural and landscape works on canvas under the tutelage of painter Mankichi Hamabe. In 1952, he began to make abstract objects and paintings, which garnered him an invitation to join the Gutai exhibitions. One of his most famous works was a site-specific installation with pools of colored water suspended in vinyl tubes hanging from trees. From then, he experimented with water and smoke as ephemeral artistic materials. Inspired in part by tarashikomi techniques in traditional Japanese painting, he began to make paintings generated by chance, tilting canvases and pooling paint.
