Passionate Winner (Seoul Olympics), 1984

Kazuo Shiraga  

Silkscreen in colors on paper, from the Official Arts Portfolio of the XXIV Olympiad, held in Seoul, Korea in 1988. Hand signed lower right by Kazuo Shiraga. Hand numbered lower left. From the edition of 300. Sheet size: 27 x 35 inches. Image size: 21.75 x 28.25 inches.

Please note our gallery has more than 1 of this artwork in stock and the exact edition number you may receive may be different than pictured.

Certificate of authenticity included. All reasonable offers will be considered.

About the Artist: Kazuo Shiraga was a Japanese artist best known for his performative painting practice. Shiraga's gestural style was influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and indicative of his participation in the Gutai avant-garde movement. The object of Gutai was to allow action and everyday life into the creation of dynamic artworks. The artist would suspend himself over his canvases, swinging back and forth, creating marks with his feet, creating a unique texture and thickness to his abstract swirls and splatters. “I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion," the artist once proclaimed. Born on August 12, 1924 in Amagasaki, Japan, he graduated from the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting in 1948, and joined the Gutai group in 1954. In a seminal early work, Challenge to the Mud (1955), the artist explored the gesture of sculpting clay by throwing himself and contorting his semi-naked body in a pit of mud. Through the following decades, Shiraga continued to work on activating art through moving a body in space. He died on April 8, 2008 in Amagasaki, Japan. Today, the artist's works are included in the collections of the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Art, among others.