NEW YORK, NY.- Pace announced its representation of the estate of Jiro Takamatsu, a profoundly influential artist, theorist, and teacher in postwar Japan. Over the course of four decades, Takamatsu worked across painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and performance, exploring philosophical and conceptual questions about perception, space, objecthood, and the nature of reality. Early in his career, he staged performative interventions in public spaces around Tokyo as part of the artist collective Hi Red Center, liberating art from its traditional context. With his radical and collaborative practice, Takamatsu made immeasurable contributions to the international avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, and played a key role in the advent of Conceptual Art.
Pace will represent Takamatsu internationally in collaboration with Yumiko Chiba Associates and Stephen Friedman Gallery.
A painting from the artist’s celebrated Shadow series will figure prominently in Pace’s presentation at this year’s edition of Art Basel. In this body of work, which dates from 1964 until his death in 1998, Takamatsu investigated fundamental conditions of representation. Engaging the act of painting as a mode of existential inquiry, Takamatsu drew inspiration from encounters with shadows in his everyday life, capturing the formal nuances of his chosen subject in lacquer with his early Shadow paintings before creating later works with acrylic and oil instead. The artist’s most famous and long-lived series, the Shadow works embody his enduring interest in the subjective nature of reality and the simultaneity of absence and existence, ideas that are reflected throughout his practice. With this series centering on silhouetted, illusionistic depictions of shadows of figures or objects, Takamatsu explored how painting could serve as a tool for critical inquiry, questioning the role of perceptual and visual phenomena in constructing notions of reality.
This fall, Pace will mount an exhibition dedicated to Takamatsu’s work at its flagship New York gallery, bringing together his Shadow and Perspective concepts.
Marc Glimcher, CEO of Pace Gallery, says: “We’re thrilled to welcome the estate of Jiro Takamatsu to our gallery, which has nurtured longstanding relationships with many significant postwar artists and artists’ estates. The significance of Takamatsu’s legacy for Minimalism and Conceptual Art, both in the Japanese art world and beyond, cannot be overstated. His contemplative, philosophical approach resonates with the concerns of artists who have been foundational to our program, such as Agnes Martin and Robert Irwin. We look forward to presenting Takamatsu’s first-ever solo exhibition in New York this coming fall, and to bringing his groundbreaking work to new audiences around the world in the years to come.”
