Born in Hyogo Prefecture in 1924. In 1947, he dropped out of Tama Art University and studied at what is now the Osaka Municipal Institute of Fine Arts. Here he met Atsuko Tanaka, who later became his wife. In 1952, together with Saburo Murakami and Kazuo Shiraga, who had also studied at the institute, he founded the Zero-kai (Zero Society), named after the idea that “all art begins from nothing,” and promoted cutting-edge painting expressions that stripped down pictorial elements to an extreme extent. In 1955, he disbanded the Zero-kai (Zero Society) and joined the Gutai Art Association, where he produced innovative works not seen in previous art expression, such as a work that had the viewer walk on black footprints and a work that had the viewer paint on a self-propelled toy car. He continued to assist Jiro Yoshihara until he and Atsuko Tanaka left the group in 1965.

After leaving the group, he took a break from performing for a while, and instead produced paintings that used figures and numbers to show the correlation between galaxies, planets, and the Earth. Kanayama’s expression varied from his early years to his later years, but throughout his life he continued to attempt to connect the minuscule world of line and color with the invisible, universal, and extreme world.

Untitled was created in 1976, the same year that the exhibition was suspended. The strict symmetrical composition and quiet interplay of colors create a creative world of lines, shapes, and colors, and the red circle represents a graphical expression of the universe. This work, which weaves together these two phases, can be positioned as one of the limits of Kanayama’s artistic expression.