Tetsumi Kudo: Microcosms

5 Feb-18 Apr 2026

Overview

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 is Kudo’s first in London, UK in over a decade, displaying a selection of works that include the artist’s signature cages, cubes and gardens. 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.

Running alongside Kudo’s exhibition is 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.
 

Artists