Matsutani Takesada

Takesada Matsutani is a Japanese avant-garde artist based in Paris and Nishinomiya. Active as a painter since the 1950s, Matsutani's practice has also included object-based sculpture, printmaking and installation. Matsutani was a member of the Gutai Art Association from 1963 until its dissolution in 1972. Gutai leader Jirō Yoshihara prioritized artistic innovation and originality, a lesson that has remained with the artist throughout his career. Since 1961, Matsutani has used wood glue, what was then a newly available material in post-war Japan, to create organic forms on the surface of the canvas. Fascinated by the variety of evocative shapes that revealed themselves through his manipulation of the glue mixed with paint, the artist regularly returned to these biomorphic forms across a variety of mediums and styles, even adapting them to the context of hard-edge painting in the 1970s. After receiving a scholarship to study for six months in Paris in 1966, Matsutani chose to settle there permanently. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, he worked primarily as a printmaker. Since the late 1970s, in parallel to his painting practice, Matsutani has been using graphite and paper as the base for large-scale installations, entitled Streams. These works, finalized by a performance of the artist in situ, explore time, energy and transformation in muted tones of black and white. Matsutani's works are represented in a large number of art museums and collections around the world. In 2002 the artist, who has lived a large part of his childhood in Nishinomiya, received the Nishinomiya City Cultural Award.

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

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