Shozo Shimamoto

On the occasion of Shozo Shimamoto. Gruppo Gutai – Primo Assalto curated by Italo Tomassoni and Giuseppe Simone Modeo at Palazzo Bastogi, Tuscany Regional Council building, Galleria Il Ponte is focusing its next exhibition, Shozo Shimamoto pittura e video-performance, on a nucleus of recent works by the Japanese artist (Osaka 1928-2013) in partnership with Fondazione Morra (Naples).

In the exhibition rooms of the gallery some large-scale acrylics on canvas, as well as some photographs and videos of his performances from the same years will be presented.


Having banned the brush, Shozo Shimamoto […] has reached, in his mature works, a sort of aesthetic monotheism. […] Punctiform paths marked by a hypnotic rhythm follow the succession of ring-like forms repeated in sequence until they prefigure the overflow of the markings over the edge… It seems evident that the biological vitalism of the pigmented tissue deposited on the support, guides – as if under the effects of a subliminal electric anxiety – the trend of the swarms of signs […].
Similar, and correlated to the graphism of the mark, is the path of the colour-mark. Colour, for Shimamoto, […] it is the means by which the distance between real space and created space is overcome. Colour follows the same kinetic and corporeal scheme as marks, in an economy where the mind governs premeditation, while the body forms a whole with the manifestation of matter. And all this happens as part of an experience that is always unique […] The colour involves the artist’s emotional core, dragging him away from an imploded and centripetal kinetics towards a burst out and centrifugal overspill […]. The coloured matter melts and blurs, at the mercy of harmonic or dissonant shock waves that open windows onto the world with spectacular deflagrations resolved in the burning moment in which they appear.
(Italo Tomassoni, Shozo Shimamoto. Tra azione e materia, tra Gutai e Art Autre, 2024).