(Tokyo 1936–1998)
Shadow No. 226, 1968, signed, numbered, dated on the reverse JIRO TAKAMATSU 1968, No 226, acrylic, enamel, metal hook on board, 33 x 24 x 8 cm, framed in Plexiglas box

Provenance:
Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo - acquired there by the previous owner in 1968

Literature:
Compare: Jiro Takamatsu, Shadow Paintings Drawings, Tokyo 1999, p. 35 (colour illustration of a similar painting of 1969)

Jiro Takamatsu was one of the most influential and important artists making contemporary art in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s. He used photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and performance to express his own intentions and to create fundamental investigations into the philosophical and material origins of art. Takamatsu was working in the fertile ground between Minimalism, Surrealism and Dada for almost four decades.
“Nothing is visible over a canvas which is painted white but sometimes when a shadow of something … a shadow of the painter who stands before the canvas … is projected, there is a necessity to depict it by following the contour of the shadow. ... However, even if I considered a white, newly stretched canvas as a work of art by itself, it could not demonstrate my sensibility, perception or ideology. It was an absolute contradiction. What solved this contradiction to some degree was to follow the contour of the actual shadow projected over the canvas with brush and paint.
However, a painting cannot be composed of a single theme alone. A work is not realised unless various elements such as reality, existence, sensibility, perception, emotion, memory, theory, logic, concept and idea intertwine and encounter something somewhere. My “Shadow” series contains various elements. They are often interpreted as the issues of absence, illusion and reality, or image, and I have certainly thought about these matters. However, when I think about it today, what was important was the identification with the existence of two-dimensionality or surface. With this identification, nothing can be added to the issue of absence.”
Jiro Takamatsu, April 22, 1987, in: Jiro Takamatsu Shadow Paintings Drawings, Tokyo 1999, p. 65

“Shadow, as a shadow of something, indicates reality but its image, on the contrary, has a negative aspect of something vanishing
and indicates unreality.”
Jiro Takamatsu Shadow Paintings Drawings, Tokyo 1999, p. 10