Fergus McCaffrey, New York / St. Barth is pleased to announce its participation in the 2015 edition of FIAC.

Paris has always been very receptive to the Japanese avant-garde, be it theater, design, fashion, music, or art. For Fergus McCaffrey’s presentation at FIAC 2015, we will focus upon the renowned avantgarde art collective called the Gutai Art Association. Founded by Jirō Yoshihara in 1954 and in existence until 1972, Gutai featured some of the most celebrated artists in Japanese postwar art history, such as Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Shōzō Shimamoto, Saburō Murakami, Tōshio Yoshida, Tsuruko Yamazaki, and Sadamasa Motonaga. Yoshihara challenged these young artists to make art that had never been seen before, and their performance paintings, outdoor interactive exhibitions, and staged events, both outdoors and on the stage, have become legendary.

Ever since the art critic Michel Tapié visited the Gutai group in Japan in 1957 and then encouraged the gallerist Rodolphe Stadler to exhibit selected Gutai artists’ works, beginning in 1959, Paris has cultivated a long and welcoming interaction with Gutai. The largest holdings of Gutai art in Europe are also located in French museums, many of them at the forefront of the study of Gutai. Particular emphasis on the group has been focused in the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition Japon des Avant-Gardes in 1986 and the Jeu de Paume’s Gutai retrospective in 1999.

Fergus McCaffrey’s presentation of Gutai at FIAC 2015 is very much a homecoming to Paris for the seminal artists to be exhibited, and it aims to serve as an eye-opening experience with the diverse practices of the movement. Among the highlights of our booth are important works by the following artists:

Sadamasa Motonaga—represented here in a preview of our November show—also had a solo presentation at FIAC in 1980, which means a further homecoming for the artist. He made colorful and explosive paintings on canvas during the 1950s and 1960s, before adopting a hugely influential cartoon-like style of paintings in the 1970s.

Fujiko Shiraga’s extraordinary and rarely seen torn and collaged works on paper started in the 1950s, ending in 1961 when she decided to put aside her own art practice in order to support the studio work of her husband, Kazuo Shiraga.

Kazuo Shiraga’s works were first exhibited in Paris in 1959 at Galerie Stadler, with the artist’s first gallery solo exhibition taking place in 1962. After this initial show, Shiraga and Stadler worked together for almost forty years. During the fair, we will exhibit Shiraga’s large-scale late foot paintings that feature his explosive and expressive painting style.

Included in our booth is a revelatory selection of works from 1953 to the 1990s by Tōshio Yoshida, a seminal but insufficiently studied first-generation Gutai artist. Yoshida’s material concerns yielded paintings of tremendous ingenuity throughout his career, notably those using rope and unusual pigments.

About Fergus McCaffrey

Founded in 2006, Fergus McCaffrey is internationally recognized for its groundbreaking role in promoting the work of postwar Japanese artists, as well as a quality roster of select contemporary European and American artists. Fergus McCaffrey’s rigorous, thoughtful approach is marked by a commitment to discovery, often presenting the work of artists previously unrepresented or misrepresented. Dublin-born founder Fergus McCaffrey has been instrumental in introducing postwar Japanese art to a Western market: works by Gutai artists Sadamasa Motonaga and Kazuo Shiraga; Hi-Red Center members Jiro Takamatsu and Natsuyuki Nakanishi; and Noriyuki Haraguchi and Hitoshi Nomura from the Mono-Ha era. The gallery also exhibits the work of emerging and seminal Western artists such as Jack Early, Marcia Hafif, Birgit Jürgenssen, Richard Nonas, Sigmar Polke, Gary Rough, William Scott, and Andy Warhol.

Fergus McCaffrey opened a second gallery location on the Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy in November 2014.