MASATO TAKASAKA
03.02.12 – 10.03.12

ALMOST EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES (IN FOUR PARTS…) *works from the permanent collection and selected loans from the EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADY-MADE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND REFRACTIONS (1994-2012)

Gertrude Contemporary is pleased to present a major solo project by Melbourne-based artist Masato Takasaka. Takasaka’s sculptural practice takes the riff, reference, collage and re-working of the ready-made as a starting point, and he will for the first time, configure a new site-specific solo project for the Gertrude main gallery spaces. This project will bring together work from across his practice, comprising new and re-worked sculptural forms, where Takasaka will act as artist and curator of his accumulative and ongoing retrospective project entitled,
the EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADY-MADE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND REFRACTIONS (1994-ongoing).

Occupying the entire main gallery, the exhibition will take the form of a series of pavilions or up-scaled maquettes, casting an alternative armature for viewing smaller sculptural works housed within. Takasaka employs the larger structure to ask the question, does the artwork support the structure or does the structure support the artwork?

Takasaka’s continued interest in building as form takes further inspiration from Marcel Duchamps’s portable museum, Boîte-en-valise (1935-41) as his impetus for the Gertrude iteration of his ongoing retrospective sculptural project. Taking his cues from Duchamp, Takasaka will be constructing his own mini-museum retrospective within the Gertrude main gallery space, reconfiguring and extending older works in an attempt, as Duchamp did, to avoid repeating himself or replicating his own work. Takasaka’s interest in accumulated histories and the ways in which an artistic practice can operate as a series of fragments, catch-phrases and obfuscations will be embellished within the exhibition.

Takasaka’s practice jams together modernist abstraction with the ready-made, blending it and extending it as a comment on the art historical adage that ‘nothing is ever new’. More recently Takasaka has been looking at 1980s Japanese Shopfront design with its myriad of art historical references and diorama-like forms. As a function of this research, and central to the exhibition, is the concept that as Takasaka states, the ‘display will be on display’. Re-configuring the main gallery space and employing the materials of architectural models Takasaka’s meta-structure both supports and obscures a series of re-worked sculptures housed within it.

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TOM POLO

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