Shinro OHTAKE: Shell & Occupy 4

So far, the “貼” series of exhibitions has reviewed Ohtake’s role over the past 30 years in developing a new visual language in Japanese contemporary art that responds to mass media imagery, underground music culture and the urban environment. This exhibition will consist entirely of works made in the past year, including the “Beach” series of small-scale collages made while the artist worked on designing the recently opened Naoshima Bath “I♥湯,” a functioning bath and art environment commissioned for the art island Benesse Art Site Naoshima.

Presented in custom frames that blur the distinctions between photograph, canvas and sculptural object, works in the “Beach” series use vintage photographs and posters of swimsuit models as the basis for mixed-media collages incorporating colorful oil and acrylic flourishes, patterned fabrics and found ephemera. Echoing themes apparent in the Naoshima Bathhouse, each work becomes a defaced archive or broken window into a bygone era of sun, play and titillation.

Ohtake takes this idea further with the new collage series “Memory of Color,” in which he applies gestural color studies of paint over densely textured beds of photographic and printed matter. Here, the means by which we record and revisit history become nothing more than formal placeholders for sensual delirium—violent blooms of red, yellow, blue and purple that obliterate the comforting restraints of legible information.

Also on display will be a three-meter-high, two-panel work that expands “Memory of Color” to architectural proportions.

Shinro OHTAKE
Born in Tokyo in 1955, Shinro Ohtake is widely regarded as one of the most influential Japanese artists of the past 30 years. His work is held in numerous Japanese and international public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, Naoshima; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent exhibitions include “New Universe on the Road,” at the Fukuoka Art Museum and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, and the groundbreaking retrospective, “Shinro Ohtake Zen- Kei Retrospective: 1955-2006,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in 2006.

* The text provided by Take Ninagawa.