Jiro Takamatsu “From Shadow to Compound”

Fergus McCaffrey (514 W 26th St.)

poster for Jiro Takamatsu “From Shadow to Compound”
[Image: "Shadow (Double Shadow of a Baby)" (1969/97) Acrylic on canvas, 85 x 114 in. © The Estate of Takamatsu Jirō; Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo, and Fergus McCaffrey, New York]

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Fergus McCaffrey presents 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.

Media

Schedule

from November 03, 2016 to January 07, 2017

Opening Reception on 2016-11-03 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Jiro Takamatsu

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