Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino (2015) at Dominique Lévy was curated by Koichi Kawasaki, the former director of the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Japan. The exhibition placed a group of 23 important abstract paintings made throughout the fifty-year career of legendary Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga in dialogue with a series of nine works from the 1990s by Satoru Hoshino, a prominent member of the avant-garde postwar Japanese ceramics group Sodeisha (Crawling Through Mud) founded by Kazuo Yagi (1918–1979) in Kyoto.

Body and Matter invited new insights into Shiraga’s extraordinary oeuvre through juxtaposition with the art of another Japanese master of medium working in clay. Although they were near contemporaries in Japan, Shiraga (1924–2008) and Hoshino (b. 1945) never met. The exhibition at Dominique Lévy marked the first time their work was juxtaposed, tracing the thread of the “formless” in the radical and poetic work of these two great postwar Japanese figures—who exploited different mediums and created fresh art-historical dialogues through their innovative approaches to matter and individuation.