Graduated from the Department of Painting at Tokyo University of the Arts, majoring in oil painting in 1958. In the same year, began participating in Yomiuri Independent from its tenth show. After exhibiting an abstract painting in oil which showed a form resembling a point at Yomiuri Independent of 1961, he submitted stringy works to the sculpture section at their 14th show the next year. In 1963, at The 15th Yomiuri Independent, he exhibited the works of the same style which were titled as: About Anti-existence Regarding the Drawer of a Table, About Anti-existence Regarding a Trunk, and About Anti-existence Regarding a Curtain. The style established for these works soon developed into series titled Point and String. His later series include: 'Shadow', 'Perspective', 'Wave, Slack', 'Oneness', 'Compound', 'Space in Two Dimensions', and 'Form'; his thoughts on substance, reality, language, and space stayed unchanged throughout his life and he kept working as if to prove the validity of his ideas.
Read MoreIn 1967, he won the Theodoran Foundation Special Prize in the 5e Biennale de Paris, Manifestation Biennale et Internationale des Jeunes Artistes, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France. He made an entry as a national delegate to the 34th Venice Biennale and got the Carlo Cardazzo Prize in 1968. In 1970, he entered 16 pieces of 'Oneness', and 36 pieces of 'Oneness' in Tokyo Biennale '70: Between Man and the Matter. In 1977, he exhibited The Rusted Earth in Documenta VI, Kassel, Germany. A large retrospective of Jiro Takamatsu was held in The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2014-15. A subsequent retrospective was held in The National Museum of Art, Osaka in 2015, followed by a retrospective, The Temperature of Sculpture, in Henry Moore Institute that was the first exhibition held in the West.
Jiro Takamatsu's works are included in the collections of major museums abroad as well as in Japan such as The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Miami Art Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern in London.
Text courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates.
