The man who painted with his feet: Kazuo shiraga and the gutai revolution

In 1950s Japan, still marked by the ashes of war and American occupation, a group of bold artists decided to question everything. Their name? Gutai—a word that means both "concrete" and "instrument," but also evokes the idea of "incarnation." Their manifesto, published in 1956, reads like a challenge: "Gutai art does not alter matter. Gutai art gives life to matter." Among these revolutionaries, Shiraga stood out for an approach that pushed physical engagement to its extreme. His feet became brushes, his body a tool of simultaneous destruction and creation. But behind these spectacular gestures lay a much deeper quest—that of an artist seeking to transcend the limits of painting, the body, and perhaps even existence itself.

When painting becomes combat

The first time Shiraga suspended himself from a rope to paint with his feet, in 1955, it was not a mere stylistic exercise. It was a radical response to a question haunting modern art: how to escape the overly controlled gesture, the controlling hand, the intention that precedes the act? By replacing the brush with his toes, Shiraga swept away the entire Western pictorial tradition in one stroke. No more learned composition, no more perspective, no more delicate touch. In their place, a raw, almost animal energy expressed through thick streaks of paint, tormented impasto, colors that seemed to burst straight from the canvas’s guts.

His most famous works, like Taisō no Keishō (1958), resemble miniature battlefields. Red dominates—a red that evokes blood, molten lava, and consuming passion. Deep blacks carve abysses into the matter, while the rarer whites appear like flashes of light in this chaos. But what strikes most is the texture. Shiraga did not merely paint: he sculpted the paint. His feet crushed, stretched, tore the material until it became a living skin, a second surface of the artist’s body.

This approach did not emerge from nothing. Shiraga had studied traditional Japanese painting (Nihonga) before violently rejecting it. He was also marked by his brief military experience during the war, a period he later described as a time when he had "seen death up close." But it was his encounter with Western art, particularly Jackson Pollock, that crystallized his revolt. Pollock, too, painted with his entire body, dancing around his canvases laid on the floor. Yet where the American seemed entranced, almost in a state of grace, Shiraga fought. His paintings were not choreographies but battles—a struggle against the canvas, against the material, against his own physical limits.

The body as the ultimate brush

To grasp Shiraga’s radicality, one must imagine the artist’s studio in the 1950s. A cramped space, cluttered with canvases, buckets of paint, ropes, and pulleys. No easel, no brushes—just a floor covered in stained tarps and the acrid smell of oil and turpentine. Shiraga often began his sessions by coating his feet in paint, as a wrestler might oil his body before a match. Then he hoisted himself onto the rope, swung above the canvas, and let gravity do the rest.

Accounts from the time describe performances lasting hours. Shiraga painted until exhaustion, until sweat beaded on his forehead, until his muscles trembled. Sometimes, he bled—his feet injured by hidden nails in the canvas or the rough edges of dried paint. These wounds were not accidents but integral elements of the work. Blood mingled with paint, creating unexpected hues, organic textures that evoked flesh itself.

This obsession with the body was not mere provocation. It was part of a broader reflection on the artist’s role in creation. In the West, since the Renaissance, the painter has often been seen as a demiurge, a creator who imposes his vision on the world. Shiraga reversed this logic. For him, the artist was not a god but a medium. His role was not to control but to be traversed by forces greater than himself—gravity, matter, the unconscious. In this, he aligned with the concerns of the Surrealists, though with a far more physical, distinctly Japanese approach.

For Shiraga was deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism, a philosophy that advocates enlightenment through action and meditation through gesture. Later, in the 1970s, he even became a Zen monk, studying under Master Sawaki Kōdō. But already in his 1950s paintings, one senses this quest for an altered state of consciousness, achieved not through contemplation but through physical effort. His feet crushing the paint became a form of zazen—a meditation in motion, where body and mind were one.

Gutai: a Japanese revolution

Shiraga was not a solitary artist. He was part of the Gutai movement, founded in 1954 by Jirō Yoshihara, a charismatic painter who dreamed of creating a new form of art, freed from the shackles of the past. The group’s name, Gutai, was a whole program. It evoked both materiality ("concrete") and the idea of "incarnation"—as if art should emerge from a fusion between the artist and his creation.

The members of Gutai came from diverse backgrounds, but they shared a common desire for rupture. Saburō Murakami tore sheets of paper in front of audiences. Atsuko Tanaka created electric dresses that lit up like neon signs. Shōzō Shimamoto hurled bottles of paint at canvases, creating explosions of color. But it was Shiraga who pushed physical engagement the furthest. His performances, like Challenging Mud (1955), where he rolled in a pit of mud and cement, became living manifestos of Gutai art.

What struck observers about these works was their ephemeral nature. Many exist only as photographs or films. Yoshihara, the group’s leader, insisted on this point: Gutai art was not a commodity but an experience—one that engaged both artist and spectator. In Please Come In (1955), an installation where visitors had to crawl through a paper tunnel, Shiraga forced the audience to physically participate in the work. Art was no longer something to be passively contemplated but an action to be lived.

This approach foreshadowed movements like Fluxus and Happenings by decades. Yet Gutai remained profoundly Japanese in its inspiration. Where Western artists often sought to intellectualize their performances, Gutai members favored instinct, spontaneity, the concrete. Their art was a response to both the trauma of war and the forced Westernization of Japan—a way of saying: We, too, can be modern, but in our own way.

Painting as the trace of a presence

Look closely at one of Shiraga’s canvases, and you will see more than paint. You will see fingerprints, traces of sweat, sometimes even hairs or bits of fabric embedded in the material. These details are not accidents but signatures. They remind us that these works were not born of a disembodied gesture but of a physical struggle with matter.

This obsession with physical traces is rooted in a much older Japanese tradition. In Zen calligraphy, for example, every brushstroke is an imprint of the calligrapher’s soul. Shiraga transposed this idea into abstract painting. His feet crushing the canvas became the equivalent of a Zen monk’s brushstrokes—gestures that did not seek to represent but to reveal.

But Shiraga went further. By using his feet instead of his hands, he deliberately broke with Western tradition, which associates the hand with artistic creation. For him, feet were more "honest"—less accustomed to manipulating, controlling, lying. They acted with a spontaneity that the hand, too educated, had lost. This idea resonates with the concerns of contemporary artists like Marina Abramović, who use their bodies as fields of experimentation. Yet where Abramović often explores pain or physical limits, Shiraga sought a form of liberation.

His most accomplished paintings, like Chijikusei Gotenrai (1961), seem to breathe. Layers of superimposed paint create an impression of organic depth, as if the canvas were living skin. The colors, often violent, evoke telluric forces—the red of blood, the black of earth, the white of bone. They resemble inner landscapes, maps of the unconscious where each trace tells a story of struggle and transformation.

The legacy of a body in motion

Today, more than sixty years after Shiraga’s first performances, his influence extends far beyond Japan. Artists like Richard Serra, who works with molten lead, or Anselm Kiefer, whose thick canvases evoke fields of ruins, owe much to this physical approach to creation. Even in contemporary art, where the digital dominates, echoes of Gutai persist. Interactive installations, works that engage the viewer’s body—all these forms of art owe something to Shiraga and his companions.

Yet the artist himself eventually turned away from this radicality. In the 1970s, after Gutai’s dissolution, he retreated to a Zen monastery and returned to a more traditional form of painting, inspired by calligraphy. His canvases became calmer, more meditative. As if, having exhausted all possibilities of struggle, he had finally found peace.

This evolution speaks volumes about the nature of his work. Shiraga was never a mere provocateur. His paintings were not just about shocking but about exploring the limits of artistic expression. By replacing the brush with his body, he transformed painting into a ritual, a spiritual quest where every gesture mattered. Today, his canvases remind us of a simple yet often forgotten truth: art is not just about ideas but also about bodies, matter, presence.

So the next time you see an abstract work, ask yourself: who created it? With what tools? And above all, with what part of themselves? Perhaps, like Shiraga, you will discover that the deepest answers lie where we least expect them—in the humblest, most concrete, most human traces.