MATSUTANI
Hauser & Wirth announces an exhibition by the artist Takesada Matsutani. This exhibition features a selection of new works in direct response to the space, a highlight of which includes a major site-specific window installation, alongside rare historic pieces by the artist from his time in the Gutai group, showcasing the breadth of his career and development of his masterful artistic practice.
April 6 – May 19, 2024
From the early 1960s until the 1970s, Matsutani was a key member of the influential post-war Japanese art collective the Gutai Art Association. As part of the group, Matsutani experimented with vinyl glue by manipulating the substance to create bulbous and sensuous forms reminiscent of human curves and features.
In some works, he leaves the swollen convex shapes, while in others he allows the glue to rupture and wrinkle, exploring the wide range of possible forms and tactile qualities of the substance. Exploring new pictorial possibilities at the intersection with sculpture, the artist explains ‘The idea was something three dimensional, on the canvas. An organic kind of shape.’
After the Gutai group disbanded in 1972, Matsutani eased into a radical yet consistent new body of work, informed by his experience at Stanley William Hayter’s renowned printmaking studio, Atelier 17. Faithful to his Gutai roots, he strove to identify and convey the essential character of vinyl glue with graphite, that were to become his signature materials.
Matsutani has created a site-specific installation in direct dialogue with the windows of the ground floor gallery space in which the large-scale constructed canvas creates a delicate interplay with the light coming in. Through his ongoing series of installations, Matsutani has remained faithful to his past, while also revisiting his country’s traditions and finding a radical way to break with artistic conventions.
Matsutani’s early experimentation is exemplified in two rare works made by Matsutani in 1965, ‘Work 65-W’ and ‘Work 65-D,’ where tactile forms on the painterly surface evoke deflated balloons as well as bodily associations. ‘Plexiglas Box’ (1966) builds on this technique, not on canvas as we have come to expect, but in three dimensions, a unique example as part of his experimentations with object-based sculpture.
Matsutani has continued to be inspired by the tactility of vinyl glue; though, today, his method places more emphasis on the meditative and methodical. Feeling a profound affinity with Zen philosophy, Matsutani attempts to stop time, to materialize a suspended moment and to acknowledge the repetition and fluidity of everyday life through his multifaceted practice.