Yumiko Chiba Associates is excited to announce an exhibition of work by Sol LeWitt and Jiro Takamatsu.

In 1967 LeWitt published the essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” in which he coined the term “conceptual art” for a new trend emerging among artists in the late 1960s.

In Japan during the same period, Jiro Takamatsu was making works of an intellectualist bent with an emphasis on thoughts and concepts. Takamatsu’s output at this time demonstrates that conceptual art was not solely an American phenomenon, but one that occurred simultaneously around the world.

Rather than taking the attitude that art is expression by the individual, by extracting and addressing the very logic, structures and systems that make up things like perception and art, such as cubes, lines and perspective, LeWitt and Takamatsu set out to interrogate how things like perception and art come to be.

Each equally unaware of the other, the pair separately undertook actions that showed the variations in representation generated by specific rules, by giving visual form on the one hand, to the limitations (LeWitt) of those variations, and on the other, to their limitlessness (Takamatsu). For both artists, drawing as a medium for developing thoughts was just as important a means of visualizing concepts as the actual three-dimensional and other works they produced. This exhibition presents not only LeWitt and Takamatsu’s sculptural works made from cubes, but alongside, drawings that offer vital clues to how the thinking behind these works unfolded. Line for Earth Project will focus primarily on work by LeWitt and Takamatsu from the second half of the 1960s to the early ’70s, in what is certain to be an unmissable opportunity to trace the parallel evolution of these conceptual art contemporaries.

Press release courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates.