Gutai en

The movement associated with the Gutai Art Association: a collective of vanguard artists founded in Ashiya in Japan 1954 and disbanded in 1972 after the death of its leader Yoshihara Jirō. Gutai in Japanese means ‘embodiment’ or ‘concreteness’. The group’s primary goal was to seek an “international common ground” of new art that would transcend modernist painting. Gutai’s experimentalism encompassed both painting (gestural abstraction in the 1950s and hard-eged abstraction in the 1960s) as well as such innovative forms as performance art (on the stage and for the press), installation art (both indoors and outdoors), land art, sound art, intermedia art, and conceptualism, among others, through which the group prefigured what to come in the 1960s. Gutai was known internationally from the late 1950s, and its legacy and reception underwent multiple periods of revival and discussion.