Jiro Takamatsu Puts Existence Under a Microscope at Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Lucy Tiven

Starting Jan. 30, Jiro Takamatsu’s first Los Angeles solo show will be on view at Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery.

The prolific post-war Japanese artist worked for over 40 years creating sculptural work, paintings and drawings.

Takamatsu co-founded experimental art collective Hi-Red Center in the early 1960s staging guerrilla-style anti-art happenings and blurring the boundaries between art and lived experiences. His influence can be seen in the Mono-ha school, Arte Povera and Post-Minimalism, among others.

Many of Takamatsu’s works use objects to delve into the nature of perspective, exploring laws of perception, absence, presence, light and shadow. Most well known of these works is his series “Shadow,” which began in 1964.

The artist’s work is rooted firmly in explorations of psychology and personal philosophy, seeing shadow, object, language and physical shape as metaphors for existence at large. Despite their thematic abstraction, Takamatsu’s philosophical inquiries are also highly personal attempts to comprehend his own existence in small tableaus, placing phenomena under a microscope.

Representing his country at the 1967 Venice Biennale, 1979 Paris Biennale and 1973 Sao Paolo Biennial, Takamatsu is a key figure in the Japanese avant-garde, working as an artist, teacher and theorist.

The Kayne Griffin Corcoran show follows two major retrospectives at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2014) and The National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka (2015).

Jiro Takamatsu is on view at the Kayne Griffin Corcoran from Jan. 30 to March 26.