Pace Gallery Takes On Estate of Artist Jiro Takamatsu, Giant of Postwar Japan

Pace Gallery will now represent the estate of Jiro Takamatsu, a key figure within postwar Japanese art history. The gallery will feature a painting by the artist in its booth at Art Basel in Switzerland next month and mount a solo show of his work in September at its flagship New York space.

As part of the representation deal, Pace Gallery will work with Takamatsu’s current dealers, Yumiko Chiba Associates in Tokyo and Stephen Friedman Gallery in London and New York.

Takamatsu (1936–1998) was known for an expansive practice that ranged from painting and sculpture to photography and performance. He represented Japan at the 1968 Venice Biennale.

He was closely associated with the mid-1960s movement Mono-Ha (School of Things), an artistic reaction to Japan’s fast-paced industrialization in the years prior. It was during this time that Takamatsu produced his “Shadow” series, in which eerie silhouettes are set against white and off-white backgrounds. (A work from that series will show be in Pace’s Art Basel booth.)

Earlier in his career, in 1963, Takamatsu founded the politically minded collective Hi-Red Center, with fellow artists Genpei Akasegawa and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, with the aim to make what they called at the time a “descent into the everyday.” Among their most famous actions was Model 1000-Yen Note (1963), in which they created their own version of the namesake currency bill; the artists were tried and found guilty of counterfeiting money.

Though Takamatsu is well-respected in Japan as both an artist and a teacher (he taught at Tama Art University in Tokyo from 1968 to 1972), his international profile has only recently begun to grow. The Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo mounted a survey for Takamatsu in 2014, and the National Museum of Art in Osaka presented a major retrospective for him the following year. He had a solo show at the Royal Society of Sculptors in London in 2019.

In a statement, Pace CEO Marc Glimcher said, “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.”