Jiro Takamatsu: The World Expands
Pace Gallery, New York
September 20 - November 2, 2024
Shadow, 1989/1997
© The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu,
courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo,
Pace Gallery, New York and
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.
Photograph by Richard Gary
Pace presents its first exhibition of JIRO TAKAMATSU (1936-1998)—a profoundly influential artist, theorist, and teacher who emerged in postwar Japan in the early 1960s—since its representation of the artist’s estate this year. The presentation at the gallery’s 540 West 25th Street flagship in New York focuses on Jiro Takamatsu’s Shadow and Perspective concepts—throughout his entire oeuvre, Jiro Takamatsu used the term “concept” to denote certain ideas or phenomena. Bringing together a selection of his paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects dating from 1966 to 1997, this exhibition showcases his inventive, deeply philosophical practice and his important role in the development of Conceptual Art.
A prolific artist who produced thousands of works over the course of his 40-year career, Jiro Takamatsu worked across painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and performance, exploring questions about perception, space, existence, and absence. Early in his practice, during the 1960s, he staged performative interventions in public spaces around Tokyo as part of the artist collective Hi Red Center, liberating art from its traditional context and shaking the foundations of the Japanese art world at the time. Presenting politically minded actions in public spaces throughout postwar Tokyo, Hi Red Center sought to dissolve boundaries between art and life—producing what the group called a “descent into the everyday”—through experimental and unorthodox approaches to making. It was also during this decade, in 1968, that Jiro Takamatsu represented Japan at the 34th Venice Biennale, cementing his status as a key figure within the international avant-garde.
Viewing the act of creating as an intensely intellectual endeavor, Jiro Takamatsu adopted a somewhat reclusive, solitary lifestyle as part of his practice. Grounded by his thoughts about and observations of the world around him, the artist’s highly conceptual works often examine ideas about reality and the self, matter and space, and presence and absence. Producing diverse bodies of work simultaneously, he examined these concepts through various mediums and forms. In one of Takamatsu’s best-known bodies of work—his iconic Shadow paintings, which he created from 1964 up until his death in 1998—he explored questions of perception and dimension as they relate to our experience of matter. In these illusionistic paintings depicting shadows of figures and objects, he presents a visual summation of the complex relationships between that which is at once existent and nonexistent, tangible and intangible, in both physical and metaphysical terms.
A selection of the artist’s Shadow paintings and drawings figures in Pace’s presentation, alongside works from his lesser-known Perspective series. Jiro Takamatsu began creating his Perspective paintings, drawings, and sculptures in the mid-1960s in tandem with his Shadow works, and the relationship between these two concepts hinges on the illusionistic potential of space, when perspective is bent by human intervention. While many of his two-dimensional, mathematically minded Perspective works depict silhouetted figures occupying geometric structures within different planes, some of these compositions are devoid of figures, focusing instead on the ways that combinations of shapes can imply interiority, exteriority, and depth. Several material objects from the Perspective series on view in the gallery’s show shed light on the ways in which Jiro Takamatsu extended these inquiries into three dimensions, imbuing his painted abstractions with a physicality that makes them all the more surreal.
JIRO TAKAMATSU: Biography
Engaging with histories of Dadaism and Surrealism through a minimalist visual language, Jiro Takamatsu’s (b. 1936, Tokyo; d. 1998, Tokyo) art centers on metaphysical ideas and concepts related to time, space, and emptiness. Over the span of his four-decade career, the artist engaged with a range of mediums, including sculpture, photography, painting, drawing, and performance art, through which he explored concepts related to perception, space, and objecthood. Jiro Takamatsu studied at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he cultivated an interdisciplinary artistic practice after graduating in 1958. In the following years, he helped establish the collective known as Hi Red Center (1963–64), which sought to dissolve boundaries between art and life through politically minded actions in public spaces. Jiro Takamatsu was also a leading figure in the Mono-Ha (School of Things) movement, centering on materiality and material conditions through non-representational art. Through his practice, Jiro Takamatsu investigated how painting could serve as a tool for critical inquiry, questioning the role of perceptual and visual phenomena in constructing notions of reality.
An influential figure of the Japanese avant-garde, presenting numerous solo exhibitions during his lifetime, Jiro Takamatsu is once again the subject of international attention, his practice lauded by scholars and curators across institutions globally. In 2014, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo opened Jiro Takamatsu: Mysteries, which traced three distinct phases of his career; in 2015, the National Museum of Art in Osaka mounted the major retrospective Jiro Takamatsu: Trajectory of Work. Takamatsu has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, United Kingdom (2017) and the Royal Society of Sculptors, London (2019). The artist’s work is held in important public collections worldwide, including Aomori Museum of Art, Japan; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London; among others.
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