Sadamasa Motonaga1922~2011 元永定正

Motonaga Sadamasa was a Japanese painter and picture-book illustrator born November 26, 1922 in Iga-Ueno, Mie Prefecture, who died of prostate cancer in Takarazuka on October 3, 2011, aged 88. After graduating from Ueno Commercial School in 1938 he moved to Osaka, and in 1955 he was invited by Yoshihara Jiro to join the Gutai Art Association, where he remained a core member for sixteen years. At the 2nd Outdoor Gutai Exhibition in Ashiya (1956) he presented his iconic Work (Water), suspending vinyl bags filled with coloured water between trees, and from 1958 he developed a signature technique inspired by the Japanese tarashikomi method, pouring and tilting pigments across the canvas. A 1966-67 Japan Society residency in New York led him to incorporate airbrush and hard-edge abstraction into his vocabulary. After leaving Gutai in 1971 he expanded into ceramics, murals and public art, and from 1970 his children’s picture books made in collaboration with the poet Tanikawa Shuntaro became long-running bestsellers.