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Jiro Takamatsu (1936-98) is central to the development of post-war art in Japan. He expanded points into volume, brought sculptural actions into the life of the city, and made shadows and perspective tangible.0'The Temperature of Sculpture' is the first institutional solo exhibition of Takamatsu outside of his home country, presenting over seventy works made between 1961 and 1977.0Takamatsu sought out the interplay between presence and absence, carefully thinking through relationships between artwork and its perceiver. He turned to sculpture in 1961, applying sculptural thinking to see how objects might change their ?temperature?.0The materials Takamatsu chose were always ready at hand. Sometimes they were tangible - everyday objects such as bottles, cloth, string, stones or furniture. Other times they had a strong association to sculptural traditions - such as marble, wood, concrete and iron. Significantly, he made use of intangible properties - perspective, shadows and numbers. These he made material and metaphorical in objects, events and drawings, giving form to the imponderables of space and time.00Exhibition: Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK (13.07. - 22.10.2017).

Yumiko Chiba Associates viewing room shinjuku is pleased to present, from June 18, 2014, an exhibition of a photographic record by Mitsumasa Fujitsuka, who photographed a joint workspace, a bar called Supper Club Cazador, in Shinjuku, Tokyo, which was produced by Shiro Kuramata and Jiro Takamatsu. In Japan, from the end of the '60s to the beginning of '70s, the people who expressed themselves in various fields - art, music, architecture, photography, design, and drama - joined together and further developed their activities, spurring one another on. In the meantime, they posed a fundamental inquiry of what an artistic expression should be and what is the grounds for being so, in their performances achieved in such an inspiring circumstances. With such a background at the time, Kuramata, who had established his own design practice, took on the interior of the Supper Club Cazador in 1967 and commissioned Takamatsu to create a mural for its walls. Through their collaboration, a new space was established inside the bar, which was illusory yet real, crossing shadows on the walls painted by Takamatsu with real shadows. Here, presence (the real shadows) coexisted with absence (the mural shadows), and the state was visualized. Takamatsu simply created the shadows (from his Shadow series) in the mural, thus he could release them from the existing frame of art and came to realize more genuine concept of absence. Kuramata also presented a new state of space and its concept beyond the scope of interior design. Fujitsuka, who had been taking photos of Kuramata's works, mentioned that Kuramata must have been awakened by a "philosophical logic of space" after his collaboration with Takamatsu. -- from Press release.