With the opening of the Gutai Pinacotheca, the shift of global art discourses towards experimental approaches, the expansion of Gutai’s collaborations and the growing critical recognition of members as fixtures of contemporary (Japanese) art, Gutai became an institution until the mid-1960s. To stimulate and rejuvenate the group, Yoshihara actively recruited emerging younger artists from the Hanshin region as so-called second and third generation members of Gutai. Artists such as Sadaharu Horio, Norio Imai, Kumiko Imanaka, Tsuyoshi Maekawa, Takesada Matsutani, Shūji Mukai, Yūko Nasaka, Minoru Onoda and Minoru Yoshida brought in new approaches, while around that time many first-generation Gutai members such as Yoshihara Motonaga, Shiraga, and Yamazaki adopted new methods, material and styles of painting, shifting from their earlier gestural abstraction to more simplified visual languages that resonated with hard-edge painting, pop and op art.
