Sadamasa aogami

Sadamasa knife
Sadamasa Motonaga was a Japanese visual artist and book illustrator, and a first-generation member of the postwar Japanese artist group Gutai Art.
Born in 1922 in Mie Prefecture, Motonaga was a member of the legendary Gutai Art Association (1954–72), which became famous for groundbreaking performance.

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Sadamasa Motonaga 元永定正 (1922–2011) was an avant-garde artist and member of the internationally celebrated Gutai Art Association (1954–72). Motonaga is widely recognized for expanding definitions of painting to encompass a wide range of experimentation with materials, performance and interactive environments, which bridge the visual culture of the immediate postwar era and contemporary painting.

Born in 1922 in Iga, Mie Prefecture, Japan, Motonaga attended a trade school and held a series of odd jobs in Osaka and his hometown while aspiring to become a manga artist. From 1946 to 1952, he trained under the Japanese Art Academy painter Mankichi Hamabe(1902–1998), who specialized in nudes and landscapes on canvas. The artist moved to Kobe in 1952, where he began experimenting with abstract painting and object making. His painting Yellow Nude (1953) received the Holbein Prize at the Ashiya City Art Exhibition, and attracted the attention of artist Jirō Yoshihara 吉原治良 (1905–1972), who invited him to join the Gutai Art Association. He continued

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Sadamasa Motonaga (b. 1922, Mie Prefecture, Japan; d. 2011, Takarazuka, Japan) was a pioneering figure in the Gutai Art Association (1955–71), a movement known for its radical and experimental approaches to artmaking. Motonaga’s early works featured cartoon-like, abstracted forms that soon gave way to his groundbreaking Water Sculptures—transparent vinyl bags filled with colored water that were suspended in space, interacting dynamically with light and gravity. These ephemeral installations exemplified Gutai’s ethos of material experimentation and performative art. By the late 1950s, he turned to fluid, gestural compositions created through poured and dripped pigments, establishing a visual language that paralleled international movements in abstraction while remaining distinctly his own.
His practice continued to evolve in the 1960s and 1970s, incorporating airbrush techniques, graffiti-like marks, and spray paint, blending the energy of postwar avant-garde aesthetics with an increasingly refined graphic sensibility. These later works often featured floating organic shapes, in

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Sadamasa Motonaga

Born in 1922 in Mie Prefecture, Motonaga was a member of the legendary Gutai Art Association (1954–72), which became famous for groundbreaking performance works and innovations in painting, sculpture, and installation art. He emerged at a time when a post-atomic surrealist existentialism was at the forefront of artistic development in Japan. However, Motonaga chose a different path, turning his back on the destruction wrought by the war in order to create paintings, sculptures, and performances that were fresh, jubilant, and playful.

In 1954, he began employing a vocabulary of embryonic shapes, flying objects, and cartoon-like forms, modeled in heavy oil paint, that revealed his interest in children’s art, manga, and popular culture, and collapsed distinctions between high and low art. By 1957, Motonaga’s work had become more abstract and featured flowing lines and pools of brightly colored pigment poured and dripped onto the canvas. This “classic style,” which developed concurrently with Morris Louis’s Veil paintings, occupied Motonaga until the mid-1960s,