YUMIKO CHIBA ASSOCIATES

SOL LEWITT AND JIRO TAKAMATSU: LINE FOR EARTH PROJECT

In 1967 Sol LeWitt published the essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” coining the term “Conceptual art” to describe certain practices emerging at the time. In Japan during the same period Jiro Takamatsu was making works of an intellectual bent that emphasized thoughts and concepts. Takamatsu’s output demonstrates that Conceptual art was not just an American phenomenon but one that occurred in various parts of the world.

Rather than uphold the belief that art is an act of individual expression LeWitt and Takamatsu set out to interrogate how art and perception come to be, focusing on their structures, systems, and constituent elements such as cubes, lines, and perspective. Though the artists were unaware of one another, they each endeavored to show the variations of representation generated by certain rules, with LeWitt giving visual form to the limitations of those variations and Takamatsu to their limitlessness.

“Line for Earth Project” primarily focuses on work by LeWitt and Takamatsu from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, displaying sculptures made from cubes alongside drawings that offer vital clues to how the thinking behind them unfolded. For both artists, drawing was as important as sculpture in developing thoughts and visualizing concepts.