Takesada Matsutani: drop in time
In his Paris studio, Japanese-born artist Takesada Matsutani talks about how he came to join the Gutai Art Association in 1963, moved to Paris in 1966, and how vinyl adhesive glue and graphite have sustained a practice ‘streaming into infinity’.
Coming of age in postwar Japan, artist Takesada Matsutani found himself longing ‘to make something beyond the canvas’. Gravitating to likeminded artists coalescing as the Gutai Art Association – gutai translating roughly to ‘concrete’ – and working increasingly with the new material of vinyl adhesive glue to make bulbous, three dimensional paintings, the artist eventually moved to Europe in 1966, finding employment in Stanley William Hayter’s Parisian engraving studio, Atelier 17, where engraving allowed Matsutani to ‘draw his imaginations’.
‘drop in time’, Matsutani’s first solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset opens on Friday 28 September 2018. The exhibition, which has been organised in collaboration with Olivier Renaud-Clément, includes new paintings and a site-specific installation, alongside a selection of prints dating from the 1960s. In addition, a series of never-before-seen assemblages will be on view, offering an insight into the breadth of the artist’s practice.