Atsuko Tanaka

*1932; member of the Gutai group (gutai = concrete), which was founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara in Japan, and ceased to exist in 1972. The Gutai group combined diverse artists who all had undergone traumatic experiences during World War II. The artists, and among them specifically Tanaka, have prefigured the Western post-war avant-garde movements by their radical conceptual approach. They expanded radically the notion of painting and sculpture into space and performative actions, a development that artists in Europe and the US discoverd much later in the late fities and early sixties.