A ONE DAY EXHIBITION CURATED BY HIROKO IKEGAMI
Hosted by Ethan Cohen in association with White Box and Ponja-Genkon

This exhibit will feature Ushio Shinohara’s newest Boxing Paintings and,for the first time in New York, exhibit his monumental ”Motorcycle Sculpture”.

Ushio Shinohara was born in Tokyo in 1932, just when Japan was about to enter an age of great change. This was a time when many of the youth were questioning the accepted cultural norms and many young artists were exploring new artistic forms. In 1957, Shinohara organized the “Neo Dada” group, one of the most radical avant-garde collectives in postwar Japan.

In1960 two young reporters visited Shinohara in his Tokyo studio, One was from the newspaper Mainichi, the other was , the future Nobel laureate for Literature, Oe Kenzaburo. On the way to Shinohara’s studio, Shinohara said that he had nothing on the walls! Oe insisted to see his works. Having no works in the studio, Shinohara said to the Mainichi reporter, “Lend me 200 yen to buy ink and paper and I will show you something special.” It was here, sporting a Mohawk and bare to the waist with his hands in boxing gloves that had ink-soaked cloth tied around them, that Shinohara first experimented in punching paper that was hung on a wall. With this new form of action painting, Shinohara was challenging the Gutai artist Shiraga’s “feet-painting” of the 1950’s. Shinohara felt that this “Boxing Painting” was “purest kind of art”. Soon, William Klein featured the creation of Shinohara’s boxing work in his 1961 documentary “Tokyo”. In 1991 The National Museum of Art, Osaka showed these early “Boxing Paintings in “Japanese Anti-Art: Now and Then”. In this last decade, Ushio Shinohara’s “Boxing Paintings” have become an area of great interest by museum and academic institutions, as well as private and corporate collectors.

Ushio Shinohara’s work is in the permanent collection of many notable museums including; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagaoka; Toyota City Museum; National Museum of Art, Osaka; and the Yokohama Museum to name a few. His work was also owned by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Shinohara has been invited to perform his action-painting in such places as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Museum of Modern Art in Kanagawa, Japan; the “Et l’Art Se Met Au Monde Prologue Pour La Biennale” at the Institut d’Art Contemporain Frac Rhone-Aipes / Nouveau Musee, Villeurbanne; the Getty Museum in LA; and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts “Action Painting Battle” exhibition in 2006. Shinohara was featured in the seminal 1994 Guggenheim exhibition and publication “Scream Against the Sky” curated by Alexandra Munroe. In 2008 Shinohara had a featured exhibition at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Aichi Japan, and in 2009 was included in the Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition “Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78”. In June 2009, Shinohara work was invited as a special exhibition at the HOT ART FAIR in Basel, Switzerland and was awarded the Curator’s Choice.

The gallery hours are from Tue – Sat, 11-6 and by appointment. Please contact the gallery for more information