It is easy to drive past the clutch of buildings that are Hauser & Wirth’s rural outpost in Somerset. They are inconspicuous alongside similar farmsteads concealed in an agrarian landscape of steep inclines, only glimpsed through rare gaps in overwhelming hedgerows that enclose the road. The gallery’s manicured buildings were previously barns for storing feed, and sheds for cattle; the now-smooth, white walls abut time-worn flagstones and aged timbers. This was an apt setting for Takesada Matsutani’s exhibition, “Drop in Time,” which evoked a legacy of farming procedures, albeit not the cliché of harvest sunshine, but unseemly acts in dark outbuildings, involving forced insemination—the works were produced from semen-like glue, deposited in singular gestures.

Matsutani was a member of the radical Gutai Art Association from 1963 until the group disbanded following the death of its joint founder, Jiro Yoshihara, in 1972. The group’s manifesto called for the false appearances of past art to be consigned to “the graveyard,” and for a close relationship between the human spirit and “the scream of matter itself.” In Matsutani’s case, this matter typically takes the form of fulsome gobbets of PVA, an innovative material when he started to experiment with it in the 1960s. Affected by its own weight and viscosity, the adhesive creeps over a base color in a wrinkled translucent film, or collects in a cloudy lump. His technique sometimes involves exhaling through a straw into a blob of glue as it begins to form a membrane, inflating it to become a breath-filled sac, clinging to the surface like a carbuncle, or bursting to form a flap like pared skin.