Artist: Tetsumi Kudo

In a wide-ranging practice spanning four decades, post-war Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935 – 1990) explored the implications of what would later be termed the Anthropocene in prescient work that interrogated the proliferation of mass consumption, the rise of technology and environmental degradation.

On view in the South Gallery, this exhibition will be Kudo’s first in London in over a decade, displaying a selection of works that include the artist’s signature cages made between 1966 and 1980. Using found materials, store-bought items and hand-sculpted body parts, they suggest a world in which nature, technology and humanity influence each other in a mutually reinforcing system he called the New Ecology. The varied environments he created are intended to encourage viewers to understand themselves as part of an integrated and intricate cosmos. His oeuvre also interrogates themes of colonialism, racism, social cohesion and the assumed superiority of man inherent in Western Culture.

Running alongside Kudo’s exhibition will be a solo show on Takesada Matsutani—a key member of the Japanese avant-garde collective the Gutai Art Association—in the North Gallery. Though the two artists were part of different movements, they are united by their relocation from Japan to Paris, France in the 1960s, where they became acquainted with each other, and by their rejection of established modes of making.