Grand Exhibition of international Designer Kenzo Takada

©High Fashion, 1971 October, Kohei Ohnishi

The first large-scale solo exhibition since the passing of Kenzo Takada, founder of the global fashion brand KENZO, will be held at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery from 6 July to 16 September. Mr. Takada was one of Japan’s first designers to enter the Paris fashion world. In the 1970s, he launched many ground-breaking collections, including his “folklore look” inspired by ethnic costumes, and straight-cut designs reminiscent of Japanese kimonos.

Throughout a career spanning more than sixty years, Paris-based artist Matsutani Takesada (1937-) has continued to create outstanding works in which the expressions, textures, and presence of material objects are interwoven with the surge and flux of life. 

In the first half of the 1960s, Matsutani distinguished himself among the second-generation artists of the Gutai Art Association by creating organic forms using vinyl adhesive, which was then a novel material. In 1966 he moved to Paris, where he began printmaking, giving greater depth to his spatial expression through a unique vocabulary of forms, eventually moving on to geometric colour surfaces. 

Later he returned to organic forms made from vinyl adhesive which he covered with graphite pencil strokes, breaking new ground in an inimitable way. In recent years his work has seen growing international acclaim, having been included in the Venice Biennale in 2017 and with a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2019. Matsutani's works come to life when a living person's flesh and blood and five senses encounter the manifestations of the materials that comprise them, including canvas and paper, vinyl adhesive and graphite. 

The sheer diversity of the works is endlessly fascinating to those who see them. This exhibition introduces Matsutani's entire oeuvre from his beginnings, including his works themselves, documents, and video footage, investigating the broad range of his work from a contemporary viewpoint.

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