TEHRAN – Japanese artist Noriyuki Haraguchi, whose Oil Pool sculpture is installed at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA), will be visiting Tehran this week to restore his sculpture, TMCA has announced.

Haraguchi executed his first Oil Pool sculpture in 1971. A later version was exhibited to great acclaim at “Documenta 6” in the German city of Kassel in 1977 and was soon after acquired by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, where it remains installed to this day.

“The items on view in the museum need to be preserved to a standard level and now after 40 years, Haraguchi will be in Iran to supervise the restoration of his work,” director of the museum Ali-Mohammad Zare’ said in a press release published on Sunday.

Haraguchi first came to prominence in Japan in the late 1960s, developing a practice that engaged with political and environmental issues through a Post- Minimal vocabulary.

Born in 1946, the artist has lived most of his life in the town of Yokosuka. The environment of Yokosuka, located just south of the massively industrialized city of Kawasaki, has indelibly shaped Haraguchi’s aesthetic.

Haraguchi’s work first came to prominence in the West with the 1977 Documenta, where his Oil Pool sculpture attracted a great deal of attention.

Since then, his work has only occasionally been seen in the United States and Europe, most notably at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2001.

Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at BankART in Yokohama, Japan in 2009, and the Yokosuka Museum of Art in 2011.

Photo: An image of Noriyuki Haraguchi’s Oil Pool sculpture installed at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

RM/YAW