Takesada Matsutani and Tetsumi Kudo: parallel visions at Hauser & Wirth London

Hauser & Wirth London is presenting two closely connected exhibition projects dedicated to Takesada Matsutani and Tetsumi Kudo, offering a rare, layered look at post-war Japanese avant-garde practices shaped by material experimentation, ecological thinking, and life between Japan and Paris. On view concurrently in the gallery’s North and South Galleries, the exhibitions trace both divergence and dialogue between two artists who rejected established modes of making in radically different yet philosophically aligned ways.

Takesada Matsutani: Gutai Art Association, material, and the suspension of time

Occupying the North Gallery, Takesada Matsutani’s exhibition marks his first solo presentation in London in over a decade and coincides with the 60th anniversary of his move to Paris. A key member of the Gutai Art Association, Matsutani’s practice has long focused on the reshaping of matter, most notably through vinyl glue and graphite.

Spanning historic and recent works, the exhibition moves from landmark pieces such as The Magic Box (1988) to newly produced canvases in which glue is tinted a deep purple, a color the artist has explored intensively over the past five years. Rooted in Gutai’s call to “do what no one has done before,” Matsutani animates materials by inflating partially dried glue with his own breath, creating bulbous, sensuous forms that hover between painting and sculpture. Graphite appears not merely as a drawing tool but as a physical presence, most powerfully in the mural-scale Streams series from the 1970s, which records time through repetitive, meditative mark-making.

Together, the works articulate Matsutani’s enduring investigation into softness and solidity, surface and structure, and the attempt to suspend a fleeting moment in physical form.

Tetsumi Kudo: ecology, Anti-Art, and the human condition

Running concurrently in the South Gallery, the exhibition dedicated to Tetsumi Kudo is the artist’s first solo show in London in more than ten years. A central figure in Tokyo’s anti-art movement and later associated with Nouveau Réalisme in France, Kudo developed a body of work that presciently addressed what would later be described as the Anthropocene.

Using cages, cubes, domes, and vitrines, Kudo constructed unsettling microcosms filled with found objects, synthetic flowers, hand-modeled body parts, and detritus gathered in Paris. These environments visualize what he termed the New Ecology, a system in which nature, technology, and humanity are inseparably entangled. Works such as Coelacanth (1970) and La Mue – For Nostalgic Purpose – For Your Living Room (1967) critique mass consumption, biomedical control, and the erosion of agency, while cube works painted like dice emphasize chance over mastery in modern life.

Despite their vivid colors and surreal compositions, Kudo’s installations function as philosophical propositions, implicating the viewer within the systems they depict.

Two artists, one shared trajectory

Although Takesada Matsutani and Tetsumi Kudo emerged from different movements, their exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth London reveal striking points of connection. Both artists relocated from Japan to Paris in the 1960s, where they became acquainted and developed practices defined by resistance to convention. Matsutani’s roots in the Gutai Art Association and Kudo’s anti-art position each reflect a refusal of fixed categories, favoring experimentation, process, and critical inquiry instead.

Seen together, these two exhibitions form a rare dialogue between material transcendence and ecological warning, between inward meditation and outward critique—offering a timely reflection on how post-war Japanese artists reshaped the language of contemporary art far beyond national borders.