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Shimamoto, Shozo (°1928)
1928 Born in Osaka, Japan.
1947 Attends the studio of master Jiro Yoshihara, where Shimamoto produces his first “HoIe” work.
1948 Shimamoto takes part in the exhibition “Seven Avant-garde Artists” at the Kintet-su department store in Osaka.
1950 Graduates from the Kansai Gakuin University in Hyugo.
1953 Takes part in the first exhibition of the Genbi-group, with Jiro Yoshihara as the true driving force. Several young exhibiting artists will join the Gutai-group later.
1954 Under Jiro Yoshihara’s guidance, Shimamoto and other students establish the Gutai Movement of Concrete Art. The name “Gutai” is Shimamoto’s suggestion.In the same year Shimamoto’s house becomes the official headquarters of the group and editorial office for the “Gutai” bulletin.
1955 The first Gutai-bulletin is edited and printed by Jiro Yoshihara and Shimamoto. Members of the Zero-group (Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami, Akira Kanayama) join the Gutai-group and take part in the “Seventh Exhibition of the Independent Yomiuri” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. On this occasion the artists sign their works with “Gutai”. The first independent group activity, an “Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-summer Sun” takes place in the Ashiya pinewood. Shimamoto exhibits “Sakuhin (Work)”, a metal sheet with small perforations, painted white on one side and blue on the other. The second Gutai-bulletin is edited and printed by Yoshihara and Shimamoto. In the same year, Shimamoto takes part in the first “Gutai Art Exhibition” at Ohara Hall in Tokyo and exhibits the work “Please, walk on this”, made up of a series of wooden boards on a system of springs that make it difficult for the public to walk on.
1956 A reporter from the American “Life Magazine” photographs the Gutai group at work, including Shimamoto’s “Performance of Destruction”, at Yoshihara Oil Mill, but the article is never published. On the occasion of the “Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition”, Shimamoto experiments with a new technique: shooting little bags full of paint from a cannon on a large red vinyl cloth. Second exhibition of the Gutai-group at Ohara Hall in Tokyo: Shimamoto places a large canvas on the floor with in the center a rock, against which he throws bottles with different colors of pigment inside. This is the first “Bottle Crash” experiment using a technique that will significantly affect his future work.
1957 The first “Gutai Art on the Stage” event at the Sankei Hall in Osaka and Tokyo: here Shimamoto presents his first pioneering “Gutai movies” and “Concrete music”. The music was made with the help of a tape recorder without adhering to any musical principles, a forerunner to Musique Concrete. Michel Tapié and George Mathieu arrive in Japan to meet with the Gutai-group. Mathieu performs one of the first “painting performances” in front of an audience. Gutai organizes a joint exhibition by Sam Francis and Toshimitsu Imai.
1958 At the second “Gutai Art on the Stage” exhibition at the Asahi Hall in Osaka, Shimamoto projects two different movies on the same screen. “The movie never seen all over the world” was made by drawing points and lines on a used 35 mm film washed in vinegar. Shimamoto realizes his first in a series of “Material Destruction” works: he smashes objects such as a tube with thousands of ping-pong balls stuck in it, a glowing light globe or a large paper cube filled with confetti. The “International Art of a New Era” exhibition is held at the Takashimaya Department Store in Osaka, touring to Kyoto and Tokyo, including works by artists as Carla Acardi, Lucio Fontana, Robert Motherwell, and Shimamoto.
1959 The BBC films Shimamoto at the Toyosaki Junior High School as he works on an action with throwing glass bottles (“Bottle crash”) filled with paint. The exhibition “Arte Nuova” is held in Palazzo Granieri at the Turin International Festival; around one hundred works by European, American and Japanese artists are displayed.
1960 Shimamoto participates in the “International Sky Festival” on the roof of the Takashimaya department store in Osaka. Foreign artists such as Lucio Fontana and Alfred Leslie send in drawings and sketches, which the Gutai artists reproduce as enlargements and fix to balloons released into the Osaka sky.
1961 Michel Tapié organizes the exhibition “Continuité et Avant-garde au Japon” at the International Center of Aesthetic Research in Turin and includes several Gutai works.
1962 The Gutai Pinacotheca opens in Osaka. Housed in an old warehouse with plastered walls owned by the Yoshiharas, it comes to function as the new headquarters. John Cage, Peggy Guggenheim and Yoko Ono visit the Gutai Pinacotheca. The Gutai Pinacotheca holds its first show with Shimamoto titled “Explosion”.
1964 Merce Cunningham and John Cage perform in Osaka and invite Shimamoto to project one of his early experimental films onto the dance stage. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg visit the Gutai Pinacotheca. The Gutai-group organizes a large Lucio Fontana exhibition at the Osaka Pinacotheca.
1965 Shimamoto participates in the “Nul65 Negentienhonderd vijfenzestig” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam with the work “Please, walk on this”. The last issue of the Gutai-bulletin is published, featuring the “Nul65 Negentienhonderd vijfenzestig” exhibition.
1966 Shimamoto participates in the “II Salon International des Galeries Pilotes” at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. Allan Kaprow publishes “Assemblage, Environments & Happenings” and includes a photo from Shimamoto’s “Performance of Destruction”. The publication describes Gutai as the pioneer of the happening. Participates in the project ZERO on SEA, organized by Henk Peeters and the international ZERO group for a pier near The Hague. As the event is canceled because of bad weather, the OREZ gallery in The Hague organizes an exhibition with drawings, models, and concepts for the ZERO on SEA project.
1968 A solo exhibition by Enrico Castellani, organized by Gutai is staged at the Gutai Pinacotheca.
1969 Takes part in the “IX Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition” at the Tokyo Museum.
1970 The group is asked to put on a number of events at the Osaka Expo: Shimamoto organizes various events as artistic production manager. The group presents ballets, installations and theatrical performances. At the entrance a vending machine sells original drawings by the Gutai artists.
1972 Solo exhibitions at the Galeria Sobrad in Sao Paulo and at the Muramatsu in Tokyo. The Gutai-group breaks up upon the death of Yoshihara.
1975 Takes part in the activities of the Artists’ Union Group, and is elected secretary general, becoming the chief representative of Mail Art. Develops a new concept for social and collective enterprises. Shimamoto invites important artists or political figures to write, draw, and place objects on his shaved head. Exhibitions with photos of his shaved head in Tokyo, Osaka and San Francisco.
1976 Takes part in “Today’s Notion of Space” exhibition at the Yokohama Municipal Gallery of Art and the retrospective “18 years of Gutai art” at the Osaka Prefecture Art Gallery. Creates one of his largest social and collective installations: a road made up of 10.000 sheets of newspaper on the banks of the River Mukogawa in the Hyogo Prefecture.
1979 Exhibits 10.000 daily papers at the “World Symposium Invitation Show” in Alberta, Canada. Participates in the “Jiro Yoshihara and Today’s Aspects of Gutai” collective at the Kobe Museum of Modern Art.
1981 One-man show at the Osaka Art Centre. In the same year he participates in “Directions in Post-War Art I, the 1950s, Gloom and Shafts of Light” at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art.
1982 “Toward the Museum of Tomorrow, Live Art Theatre” at the Kobe Museum of Modern Art.
1983 Elected Mayor of the Wakayama Ryujin International Art Village. Participates in the exhibition “Dada in Japan / Japanese Avantgarde 1920-1970” held at the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf, later traveling to Tokyo. Shimamoto participates in the Dada in Japan exhibition held at the Museum Kunstpalast. In an artist‘s studio Shimamoto creates a large “Cannon” painting.
1984 Performance at the Hundertmark Gallery in Cologne.
1985 “Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan 1945-1965” at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art and traveling to Edinburgh includes Shimamoto’s work. “Gutai Group: Pintura y Accion” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, and later at the Muzej Savremene Umetnosti in Belgrade and at the Museum of Modern Art in Kobe.
1986 For the “First Osaka Sister-City Festival” Shimamoto invites Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, the leading Italian mail artist. From then on, Shimamoto uses his shaved head as an instrument for his mail art activities, taking part in the “Peace Run” across Europe organized by the American Indian Group, spreading a message of peace through his performance. “Japon des Avant-Gardes 1910-1970” exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Centre Paris where he presents his audio work and “Please, walk on this”. The French minister of culture, François Léotard, writes a message of peace on the shaved head of Shimamoto. Bern Porter, the inventor of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb invites Shimamoto to become a member of the “Institute of Advanced Thinking”
1987 As a guest of the Dallas Museum he does a performance on the centenary of the birth of Marcel Duchamp: a message of peace and film clips are projected on his shaved head.
1990 For the opening of “Giappone all’avanguardia. II Gruppo Gutai negli anni Cinquanta” at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Shimamoto reconstructs his 1956 performance “Material Breakthrough” done at the “The 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” at the Ohara Hall in Tokyo. Shimamoto invites mail artists to send him small objects to put inside small bottles filled with paint.
1991 Takes part in the “Gutai Japanische Avantgarde 1954-1965” exhibition organized by the Institut Mathildenhohe in Darmstadt.
1992 Becomes president of the association of handicapped artists, setting up the first large-scale project for exhibitions by handicapped artists. Gutai I - 1959-1965, Ashiya City Museum.
1993 Gutai II - 1965-1972, Ashiya City Museum. Performs a “Bottle Crash” at the 45th Venice Biennial.
1994 On show at the exhibition “Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky” held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
1996 Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his pacifist activities.
1997 Solo exhibition with performance at the Hundertmark Gallery in Cologne.
1998 Shimamoto’s work “Ana (Hole)” is displayed in the same room as Jackson Pollock, John Cage and Lucio Fontana in the exhibition “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979” organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibition travels to the MAK in Vienna, then to the Macba in Barcelona and the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art.
1999 Invited again to the Venice Biennial, on show in the Japanese pavilion with David Bowie and Yoko Ono. At the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, participates in the “Gutai” retrospective.
2000 A large-scale performance in Dyon, creating an enormous surface out of sheets of newspaper from all over the world which he strikes with balloons filled with paint thrown from a hot air balloon.
One of the works produced during the performance is displayed at the Unesco Head Office in Paris.
The Nishinomiya Yacht Harbour hosts the beginning of the work entitled “A Proof of Peace”, which will become a monument on the site for 100 years.
2001 Takes part in the exhibition “Le Tribù delI’Arte” at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.
2003 Invited to the 50th Venice Biennial presenting the “Brain Academy Apartment International Project”. Takes part in “Skin Deep” at the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, MART, in Rovereto.
2004 Solo exhibition at the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, where he performances “Nyotaku”.
2005 For the second time in Italy he does a performance in Trevi where he throws paint on large canvases from a helicopter. Solo exhibition at the Flash Art Museum in Trevi.
2006 Invited to show several of his works, including his early films, at the “ZERO. Internationale Künstler-Avantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre” collective at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf and later at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne. The Fondazione Morra in Naples commissions Shimamoto’s “A weapon of Peace”, one of his larges performances on the occasion of the exhibition Shimamoto, Opera anni ’50-’90.
2007 “Bottle Crash” performance at the cloister San Nicolo at the occasion of the Venice Biennale. Involved in the organization of the event “Art Challenged Project” in Beijing with a number of disabled artists from Japan. A few of his more representative works on display in the group exhibition “Artempo, where time becomes art” at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice.
2008 “Shozo Shimamoto. Samurai, acrobata dello sguardo” at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea at Villa Croce, Genoa.
2009 Shimamoto is included with “Please, walk on this”, his early films and his perforated metal plate in the Venice Biennale’s main Pavilion, together with a selected group of Gutai artists.
2010 Participates in the large Gutai show “Painting with Time and Space”, Museo Cantonale d’Arte Lugano, curated by Tijs Visser, with historical works.
2011 Reactivates a “Cannon Painting” and a “Material Destruction (PingPong)” performance for the Moderna Museet Stockholm, for the International conference on Time and Space organized by the ZERO foundation Düsseldorf. Takes part in the exhibition “Nul, in an international context” at the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam with objects, drawings and concepts for the project ZERO
on SEA.
2012 Solo show “Shozo Shimamoto- Works 1950-2011” at Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia. The Axel Vervoordt Gallery Antwerp organizes a solo show. Participates in the exhibition “Explosion: Painting in Action” at the Moderna Museet Stockholm. Exhibition “Painting the Void” at Moca Los Angeles with a room dedicated to Shimamoto.
1928 Born in Osaka, Japan.
1947 Attends the studio of master Jiro Yoshihara, where Shimamoto produces his first “HoIe” work.
1948 Shimamoto takes part in the exhibition “Seven Avant-garde Artists” at the Kintet-su department store in Osaka.
1950 Graduates from the Kansai Gakuin University in Hyugo.
1953 Takes part in the first exhibition of the Genbi-group, with Jiro Yoshihara as the true driving force. Several young exhibiting artists will join the Gutai-group later.
1954 Under Jiro Yoshihara’s guidance, Shimamoto and other students establish the Gutai Movement of Concrete Art. The name “Gutai” is Shimamoto’s suggestion.In the same year Shimamoto’s house becomes the official headquarters of the group and editorial office for the “Gutai” bulletin.
1955 The first Gutai-bulletin is edited and printed by Jiro Yoshihara and Shimamoto. Members of the Zero-group (Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami, Akira Kanayama) join the Gutai-group and take part in the “Seventh Exhibition of the Independent Yomiuri” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. On this occasion the artists sign their works with “Gutai”. The first independent group activity, an “Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-summer Sun” takes place in the Ashiya pinewood. Shimamoto exhibits “Sakuhin (Work)”, a metal sheet with small perforations, painted white on one side and blue on the other. The second Gutai-bulletin is edited and printed by Yoshihara and Shimamoto. In the same year, Shimamoto takes part in the first “Gutai Art Exhibition” at Ohara Hall in Tokyo and exhibits the work “Please, walk on this”, made up of a series of wooden boards on a system of springs that make it difficult for the public to walk on.
1956 A reporter from the American “Life Magazine” photographs the Gutai group at work, including Shimamoto’s “Performance of Destruction”, at Yoshihara Oil Mill, but the article is never published. On the occasion of the “Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition”, Shimamoto experiments with a new technique: shooting little bags full of paint from a cannon on a large red vinyl cloth. Second exhibition of the Gutai-group at Ohara Hall in Tokyo: Shimamoto places a large canvas on the floor with in the center a rock, against which he throws bottles with different colors of pigment inside. This is the first “Bottle Crash” experiment using a technique that will significantly affect his future work.
1957 The first “Gutai Art on the Stage” event at the Sankei Hall in Osaka and Tokyo: here Shimamoto presents his first pioneering “Gutai movies” and “Concrete music”. The music was made with the help of a tape recorder without adhering to any musical principles, a forerunner to Musique Concrete. Michel Tapié and George Mathieu arrive in Japan to meet with the Gutai-group. Mathieu performs one of the first “painting performances” in front of an audience. Gutai organizes a joint exhibition by Sam Francis and Toshimitsu Imai.
1958 At the second “Gutai Art on the Stage” exhibition at the Asahi Hall in Osaka, Shimamoto projects two different movies on the same screen. “The movie never seen all over the world” was made by drawing points and lines on a used 35 mm film washed in vinegar. Shimamoto realizes his first in a series of “Material Destruction” works: he smashes objects such as a tube with thousands of ping-pong balls stuck in it, a glowing light globe or a large paper cube filled with confetti. The “International Art of a New Era” exhibition is held at the Takashimaya Department Store in Osaka, touring to Kyoto and Tokyo, including works by artists as Carla Acardi, Lucio Fontana, Robert Motherwell, and Shimamoto.
1959 The BBC films Shimamoto at the Toyosaki Junior High School as he works on an action with throwing glass bottles (“Bottle crash”) filled with paint. The exhibition “Arte Nuova” is held in Palazzo Granieri at the Turin International Festival; around one hundred works by European, American and Japanese artists are displayed.
1960 Shimamoto participates in the “International Sky Festival” on the roof of the Takashimaya department store in Osaka. Foreign artists such as Lucio Fontana and Alfred Leslie send in drawings and sketches, which the Gutai artists reproduce as enlargements and fix to balloons released into the Osaka sky.
1961 Michel Tapié organizes the exhibition “Continuité et Avant-garde au Japon” at the International Center of Aesthetic Research in Turin and includes several Gutai works.
1962 The Gutai Pinacotheca opens in Osaka. Housed in an old warehouse with plastered walls owned by the Yoshiharas, it comes to function as the new headquarters. John Cage, Peggy Guggenheim and Yoko Ono visit the Gutai Pinacotheca. The Gutai Pinacotheca holds its first show with Shimamoto titled “Explosion”.
1964 Merce Cunningham and John Cage perform in Osaka and invite Shimamoto to project one of his early experimental films onto the dance stage. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg visit the Gutai Pinacotheca. The Gutai-group organizes a large Lucio Fontana exhibition at the Osaka Pinacotheca.
1965 Shimamoto participates in the “Nul65 Negentienhonderd vijfenzestig” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam with the work “Please, walk on this”. The last issue of the Gutai-bulletin is published, featuring the “Nul65 Negentienhonderd vijfenzestig” exhibition.
1966 Shimamoto participates in the “II Salon International des Galeries Pilotes” at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. Allan Kaprow publishes “Assemblage, Environments & Happenings” and includes a photo from Shimamoto’s “Performance of Destruction”. The publication describes Gutai as the pioneer of the happening. Participates in the project ZERO on SEA, organized by Henk Peeters and the international ZERO group for a pier near The Hague. As the event is canceled because of bad weather, the OREZ gallery in The Hague organizes an exhibition with drawings, models, and concepts for the ZERO on SEA project.
1968 A solo exhibition by Enrico Castellani, organized by Gutai is staged at the Gutai Pinacotheca.
1969 Takes part in the “IX Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition” at the Tokyo Museum.
1970 The group is asked to put on a number of events at the Osaka Expo: Shimamoto organizes various events as artistic production manager. The group presents ballets, installations and theatrical performances. At the entrance a vending machine sells original drawings by the Gutai artists.
1972 Solo exhibitions at the Galeria Sobrad in Sao Paulo and at the Muramatsu in Tokyo. The Gutai-group breaks up upon the death of Yoshihara.
1975 Takes part in the activities of the Artists’ Union Group, and is elected secretary general, becoming the chief representative of Mail Art. Develops a new concept for social and collective enterprises. Shimamoto invites important artists or political figures to write, draw, and place objects on his shaved head. Exhibitions with photos of his shaved head in Tokyo, Osaka and San Francisco.
1976 Takes part in “Today’s Notion of Space” exhibition at the Yokohama Municipal Gallery of Art and the retrospective “18 years of Gutai art” at the Osaka Prefecture Art Gallery. Creates one of his largest social and collective installations: a road made up of 10.000 sheets of newspaper on the banks of the River Mukogawa in the Hyogo Prefecture.
1979 Exhibits 10.000 daily papers at the “World Symposium Invitation Show” in Alberta, Canada. Participates in the “Jiro Yoshihara and Today’s Aspects of Gutai” collective at the Kobe Museum of Modern Art.
1981 One-man show at the Osaka Art Centre. In the same year he participates in “Directions in Post-War Art I, the 1950s, Gloom and Shafts of Light” at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art.
1982 “Toward the Museum of Tomorrow, Live Art Theatre” at the Kobe Museum of Modern Art.
1983 Elected Mayor of the Wakayama Ryujin International Art Village. Participates in the exhibition “Dada in Japan / Japanese Avantgarde 1920-1970” held at the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf, later traveling to Tokyo. Shimamoto participates in the Dada in Japan exhibition held at the Museum Kunstpalast. In an artist‘s studio Shimamoto creates a large “Cannon” painting.
1984 Performance at the Hundertmark Gallery in Cologne.
1985 “Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan 1945-1965” at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art and traveling to Edinburgh includes Shimamoto’s work. “Gutai Group: Pintura y Accion” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, and later at the Muzej Savremene Umetnosti in Belgrade and at the Museum of Modern Art in Kobe.
1986 For the “First Osaka Sister-City Festival” Shimamoto invites Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, the leading Italian mail artist. From then on, Shimamoto uses his shaved head as an instrument for his mail art activities, taking part in the “Peace Run” across Europe organized by the American Indian Group, spreading a message of peace through his performance. “Japon des Avant-Gardes 1910-1970” exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Centre Paris where he presents his audio work and “Please, walk on this”. The French minister of culture, François Léotard, writes a message of peace on the shaved head of Shimamoto. Bern Porter, the inventor of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb invites Shimamoto to become a member of the “Institute of Advanced Thinking”
1987 As a guest of the Dallas Museum he does a performance on the centenary of the birth of Marcel Duchamp: a message of peace and film clips are projected on his shaved head.
1990 For the opening of “Giappone all’avanguardia. II Gruppo Gutai negli anni Cinquanta” at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Shimamoto reconstructs his 1956 performance “Material Breakthrough” done at the “The 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” at the Ohara Hall in Tokyo. Shimamoto invites mail artists to send him small objects to put inside small bottles filled with paint.
1991 Takes part in the “Gutai Japanische Avantgarde 1954-1965” exhibition organized by the Institut Mathildenhohe in Darmstadt.
1992 Becomes president of the association of handicapped artists, setting up the first large-scale project for exhibitions by handicapped artists. Gutai I - 1959-1965, Ashiya City Museum.
1993 Gutai II - 1965-1972, Ashiya City Museum. Performs a “Bottle Crash” at the 45th Venice Biennial.
1994 On show at the exhibition “Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky” held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
1996 Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his pacifist activities.
1997 Solo exhibition with performance at the Hundertmark Gallery in Cologne.
1998 Shimamoto’s work “Ana (Hole)” is displayed in the same room as Jackson Pollock, John Cage and Lucio Fontana in the exhibition “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979” organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibition travels to the MAK in Vienna, then to the Macba in Barcelona and the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art.
1999 Invited again to the Venice Biennial, on show in the Japanese pavilion with David Bowie and Yoko Ono. At the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, participates in the “Gutai” retrospective.
2000 A large-scale performance in Dyon, creating an enormous surface out of sheets of newspaper from all over the world which he strikes with balloons filled with paint thrown from a hot air balloon.
One of the works produced during the performance is displayed at the Unesco Head Office in Paris.
The Nishinomiya Yacht Harbour hosts the beginning of the work entitled “A Proof of Peace”, which will become a monument on the site for 100 years.
2001 Takes part in the exhibition “Le Tribù delI’Arte” at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.
2003 Invited to the 50th Venice Biennial presenting the “Brain Academy Apartment International Project”. Takes part in “Skin Deep” at the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, MART, in Rovereto.
2004 Solo exhibition at the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, where he performances “Nyotaku”.
2005 For the second time in Italy he does a performance in Trevi where he throws paint on large canvases from a helicopter. Solo exhibition at the Flash Art Museum in Trevi.
2006 Invited to show several of his works, including his early films, at the “ZERO. Internationale Künstler-Avantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre” collective at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf and later at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne. The Fondazione Morra in Naples commissions Shimamoto’s “A weapon of Peace”, one of his larges performances on the occasion of the exhibition Shimamoto, Opera anni ’50-’90.
2007 “Bottle Crash” performance at the cloister San Nicolo at the occasion of the Venice Biennale. Involved in the organization of the event “Art Challenged Project” in Beijing with a number of disabled artists from Japan. A few of his more representative works on display in the group exhibition “Artempo, where time becomes art” at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice.
2008 “Shozo Shimamoto. Samurai, acrobata dello sguardo” at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea at Villa Croce, Genoa.
2009 Shimamoto is included with “Please, walk on this”, his early films and his perforated metal plate in the Venice Biennale’s main Pavilion, together with a selected group of Gutai artists.
2010 Participates in the large Gutai show “Painting with Time and Space”, Museo Cantonale d’Arte Lugano, curated by Tijs Visser, with historical works.
2011 Reactivates a “Cannon Painting” and a “Material Destruction (PingPong)” performance for the Moderna Museet Stockholm, for the International conference on Time and Space organized by the ZERO foundation Düsseldorf. Takes part in the exhibition “Nul, in an international context” at the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam with objects, drawings and concepts for the project ZERO
on SEA.
2012 Solo show “Shozo Shimamoto- Works 1950-2011” at Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia. The Axel Vervoordt Gallery Antwerp organizes a solo show. Participates in the exhibition “Explosion: Painting in Action” at the Moderna Museet Stockholm. Exhibition “Painting the Void” at Moca Los Angeles with a room dedicated to Shimamoto.
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