![]() The artist’s official welcome into Gutai was sealed with a solo show at the group’s pinacotheca, or picture gallery, in Osaka in 1963. Finally, Yoshihara accepted Matsutani’s work as genuinely innovative. Inspired by okonomiyaki - savory pancakes made with wheat flour batter and enlivened with toppings of seaweed and meat - he added “toppings” of acrylic and oil paints to the round swellings. “I liked them to be organic, very sensual,” Matsutani says of the protrusions’ shapes. Then he began to experiment with manipulating glue with hair dryers and fans. A chance gust of wind blew it into the shape of stalactites. One day when the weather was fine, he headed outside and poured some on a canvas. In 1961, Matsutani had his Damascene moment when he discovered polyvinyl acetate adhesive, otherwise known as Elmer’s glue. ![]() “I wanted to change,” he says, “it’s the Gutai way.” For decades, the artist was partial to black in his paintings, but the works in the show make use of color - most memorably, a yolky shade of yellow. ![]() Earlier this month, “ Combine,” an exhibition of Matsutani’s work that includes 11 of his recent three-dimensional canvases, their painted surfaces thick with adhesive glue, as well as a 1992 scroll from his “Stream” series that hangs from the ceiling, opened at Hauser & Wirth in Manhattan. Matsutani was accepted into Gutai in 1963, when he was only 26 years old, on account of his vinyl-glue works - canvases with protrusions of dried glue that resembled, as the text accompanying his first solo show put it, “nipples, blisters or swelling from a burn.”Īnd he’s continued making work in the years following Gutai’s dissolution in 1972: silk-screen prints featuring geometric planes of color, wall-length scrolls covered in thousands of graphite strokes, performance works exploring his feelings of displacement as a Japanese artist living in France. The group is often credited with anticipating both performance and conceptual art and is perhaps best known for Saburo Murakami’s “Laceration of Paper” (1955), for which he ran through a series of paper screens at speed, his body punctuating each surface like a torpedo. For over six decades, the Osaka-born, Paris-based artist Takesada Matsutani has lived by the credo “make it new.” This phrase, made famous by Ezra Pound, was not only the unofficial manifesto of Modernism but also of one of that movement’s intellectual and aesthetic descendants - the avant-garde collective of some 20 Japanese artists formed in Osaka in 1954 and known as Gutai. ![]()
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