Frieze Masters

For the 2021 edition of Frieze Masters, Stephen Friedman Gallery brings together a group of historical works from the 1970s through 1990s centred around the work of Japanese artist Jiro Takamatsu in relation to his contemporaries. Positioning his work alongside key examples by Richard Diebenkorn, Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt, the presentation looks at their shared exploration of two-dimensional space across a range of media including painting, works on paper and sculpture. 

As evident in the works by Takamatsu featured in the exhibition, these artists favour muted, often monochromatic, palettes and geometric forms, which function together to establish a spatial play across one or more flat planes. This play ranges from the coloured bands in Takamatsu's spare paintings, which hug the edges of the canvas to bend and warp space, to the subtlety of Truitt’s quietly shifting close-valued tones. These works engage with the flatness of the two-dimensional plane, whether that of the singular surface of a painting, or the oscillation of multiple planes in space in Takamatsu and Truitt's sculptural work. On the other hand, Martin and Diebenkorn set up a different relationship to space, one that uses a soft, hand-rendering of geometric forms, and especially the grid, to dissolve the surface of the canvas or sheet of paper, beckoning the viewer into a shimmering pictorial field. Altogether, this group of works allows the viewer to assess a range of formal possibilities that arise from the kinds of graphic pairings of form and colour manifested by Takamatsu’s work.

The presentation is accompanied by an essay written by Alex Bacon, an art historian based in New York City who regularly writes criticism and organizes exhibitions of both contemporary and historical art. Until recently he was a Curatorial Associate at the Princeton University Art Museum.