Sadamasa Motonaga
Born: Iga Ueno, Mie, 1922. Died: 2011
Period of Membership in GUTAI: 1955-1971
Before turning his attention to painting, Motonaga had originally aspired to be a manga artist.
In 1952 he moved to Kobe, and in 1953 he won a prize at the 6th Ashiya City Exhibition, where he exhibited a piece depicting a nude woman.
Taking inspiration from the abstract paintings exhibited at the Ashiya City Exhibition, he himself began to work on abstract paintings.
At the 1955 Gutai Outdoor Art Exhibition, he was invited by Jiro Yoshihara to join the Gutai Art Association. His piece, “Work (Water)”, which he exhibited at the Gutai Outdoor Art Exhibition, earned praise from Yoshihara as a “water sculpture”. From the late 1950s, he began to use a method of pouring paint over a tilted canvas. He pursued a unique composition in which paints in primary colors were mixed around a rounded form which seemed to have grown from the bottom of the canvas. In the latter half of the 1960s, he moved to the United States, where his work evolved into pieces utilizing airbrushes and acrylic paints.
