Fergus McCaffrey is proud to present its third solo exhibition of Jiro Takamatsu (1936–1998), featuring paintings,
sculptures, photographs, text works, and drawings dating from 1966 to 1978.
Perhaps the most influential artist working in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, Jiro Takamatsu altered the evolution
of visual art in Japan as an artist, theorist, and teacher. As a
cofounder of the legendary collective Hi Red Center in 1963
and the central inspiration for Mono-Ha, Takamatsu dominated
Japanese artistic discourse during these years.
His work would be incomprehensible without acknowledging
the discourse and aesthetic precedents of Surrealism and
Minimalism, as well as his background in the Anti-Art and Neo-
Dada movements. A contrarian by nature, Takamatsu challenged
the prevailing orthodoxy of paintings purged of representation
and sculptures that emphasized truth to materials and the antiillusional.
Takamatsu had studied painting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music but had become disillusioned
by its limitations. Thus when he began making Shadow paintings in 1964, he was searching for a new foundation to
reimagine the practice. Key to this reappraisal was Pliny’s story of the origin of painting with the tracing of a shadow,
and Takamatsu began making intriguing visual puzzles with single or multiple cast shadows of people and objects
(often distorted) in gray paint on white wooden supports and canvases. In most cases, the person or object casting the
shadow is missing, creating a pictorial and narrative absence. The Shadow paintings are wide open to interpretation in
all manner of formal, psychological, and sociopolitical terms.
In 1966, Takamatsu began to explore the visual fiction of perspectival depth and a parallel interrogation of sculptural
forms. Perspective Painting (1967) simultaneously affirms and denies its own coherence, as the rules of perspective
are played against each other on the same panel. In sculpture, the distortion and deconstruction of the cube and
the grid yielded further innovations. Cube 6 + 3 (1968) negates the materiality of a blue wooden cube through the
addition of red perspective lines that from one viewing point suggests the cube is transparent. To create Slack of Net
(1968–69), he inserted excess rope throughout a square grid, to create a soft sculpture that sagged and yielded to
gravity. Takamatsu attacked Oneness of Plaster (1970-71) and Oneness of Concrete (1971) with a chisel, challenging
and fracturing the symbolic authority of these high modernist forms. His Compound series followed, addressing
multiple forms in combination, emphasizing the physical interaction created between them. In works such as
Compound (1972), he took utilitarian objects—such as a ladder and a brick—and removed their functionality to create
a new abstract relationship between the two elements. He also created complex compounds of the same or similar
materials, such as Compound No. 747 (1976), opening up three-dimensional structures and connecting them to
the underlying lines and planes of the surrounding space.
Takamatsu participated in the Bienal de São Paulo in 1973 with a
new project he called Photograph of Photograph. He commissioned a
professional photographer to rephotograph pictures from his family
album in compositions that he had arranged. Each photograph was
rephotographed from an acute angle to articulate deep shadows
and bleached-out highlights and to make plain the worn and
abraded dog-eared corners and dents in the photographic emulsion.
These beautiful and haunting images pose more questions than
they reveal answers, and they make us aware of photography’s
materiality, history, and internal narratives.
Takamatsu represented Japan at the 1968 Venice Biennale, winning
the Carlo Cardazzo Prize, and exhibited at the 1969 Biennale de
Paris. Between 1968 and 1972, he taught at Tama Art University,
Tokyo. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives,
including at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (1999 and 2015);
Chiba City Museum of Art (2000); Fuchu Art Museum, Tokyo
(2004); Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (2004); and
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2014).
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph with an in-depth essay by the independent curator
and writer Douglas Fogle.
