2. Artists & stock
3. Takesada Matsutani
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Takesada Matsutani is born in 1937 in Osaka (Japan). As a teenager, he attends the art school of his hometown city, where he studies painting and traditional Japanese art of pigment and glue in bone (Nihonga). Suffering from tuberculosis, he spends eight years of his life at home, mostly bedridden. From the experience of this isolation, he pulls his first sketch. Very soon, he receives the dual influence of traditional Japanese culture and Western art. Surrealism marks him; then informal art introduced to Japan by the art critic Michel Tapie.
In 1959, Sadamasa Motonaga puts him in contact with the Gutaï group, a group he joins; Matsutani takes an active part in this first movement of Japanese postwar avant-garde affiliated with Western art, first Japanese movement to achieve international success and opened the path for contemporary art in this country. In 1966, the artist comes to Paris to study. He joins the following year the Atelier 17 led by Stanley William Hayter, and he becomes his assistant in 1969. Matsutani stays six years next to Hayter, discovering through the hard way of engraving the richness of black that dominates, from that moment, his work.
Takesada Matsutani never leaves France. The artist, a researcher at heart, is enriched by thousands of encounters and a thousand experiments. He works one time with Kumi Sugaï. Since the late 1970s, he designs regularly facility that expresses his own questions in his paintings and his prints. In the latter area, he is a wonderful engraver; he also realizes lithographs (second prize of the Osaka Triennial in 1990) and participates in the adventure of the modern illustrated book with contemporary poets or depicting ancient texts.
The art of Takesada Matsutani, subtle, poetic and universal, conjugates the spiritual questions about space and time. His preferred tools are the glue and pencil graphite that allow him to make us capture moments of eternity. From the two dimensions of the canvas or paper, the artist conceives vinyl glue’s reliefs that leave their hand at random.
The blisters created by the glue broke the austere and repetitive rhythm of the passage of the pencil or brush.
The silence is there, life, grace of light, its mystery, tranquility, the light and essence of things.
There are countless personal exhibitions of Takesada Matsutani and major group exhibitions in which the artist participated in France and worldwide (Europe, America, Japan). In the field of printmaking, his etchings for example are exhibited along those of Chillida, Miro or  also Tapies at the Museum of Louvain in 1986. Many international institutions have works by the artist in their collection (Museum of Art in Lodz, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, etc.).

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