Taka Ishii Gallery is opening a new location in Kyobashi, at the center of Tokyo. To mark the opening of this new space, a group exhibition themed around portraits will be held from Saturday, November 2 to Saturday, December 14. This show will feature approximately 14 works by 11 artists.People now take images with their smartphones and upload them on social media, allowing them to see the faces of others at any time. Memorable moments with our family and friends can be accessed at any time via camera rolls or cloud services. Surveillance cameras capture offenders involved in an event, and their portraits from graduation albums are leaked and broadcast in the media. Before photographic technology, there were few ways to physically preserve how others looked. Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, cites the myth that the origin of painting was the deed of a woman tracing the shadow of her lover before going to war, but such a time is difficult for us to imagine today.The visual experience associated with art has changed significantly along with it. Some people may follow artists’ social media accounts, where you can get a glimpse of their personalities. Others may obtain information about exhibitions online, confirming in advance which artists’ works are on display. In today&apos;s age of information transparency, there is also a method that dares to highlight “mysteries”. Not to mention the artist who leaves graffiti anonymously around the world, but there are also singers and idol groups that gain immense popularity without showing their faces. While there are those who are simply drawn to the work and the singer&apos;s voice, there is a wide range of reactions to such activities, including obsessive pursuit to somehow uncover their true identities. How do we respond when we see a work in front of us? The shape of a shadow changes depending on the angle from which light strikes it, and so does the variety of interpretations of a piece of art.【Participating artists】Nobuyoshi Araki, Tomoo Gokita, Goro Kakei, Sanya Kantarovsky, Naoto Kawahara, Graham Little, Ittetsu Matsuoka, Daido Moriyama, Kyoko Murase, Ser Serpas, Hiroka Yamashita

Taka Ishii Gallery Kyobashi

Group Exhibition

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the works by Erwin Bohatsch, from Saturday, January 25 to Saturday, February 22. Bohatsch is recognized as a leading figure in Austrian art history, particularly in abstract painting. This marks his first presentation at the gallery and will feature nine paintings and thirteen works on paper from his recent oeuvre.Although Bohatsch has been pursuing a distinctly individual and exemplary path through his career, his work is inseparable from the discourse of Austrian art of the late 70s to 90s. In the early 80s, when he emerged in the Austrian art scene, his paintings carried all features of “New Painting”, depicting motifs in organic forms and bleak colors. At the time, he became a member of the “Neue Malerei” (New Painting) group and was considered as one of the artists of Neue Wilde (neo-expressionism). By the late 1980s, the artist departed from this current and entered on abstract reduction, eliminating the narrative, figurative and expressive qualities of the paintings. This shift signaled a commitment to openness and clarity, hallmarks of his mature style.The artist’s recent works exemplify his purist approach, emphasizing line, form, color, and materiality. Curved color planes, fine lines, and spontaneous marks combine to produce compositions rich with tension and rhythm. On the fields of earthy beige and black, bright colors such as green, yellow and blue are also used effectively within a limited area. The poured color, spread thinly with a spatula, forms a layer of translucent colored surfaces, creating new forms in the overlapping areas and sense of spatial depth on the painting.Bohatsch’s works, in which multiple spatial structures unfold, will offer viewers an open and engaging visual experience.

Erwin Bohatsch

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present Rei Naito’s solo exhibition “breath” from Saturday, March 1 to Saturday, March 29. The exhibition will open at Taka Ishii Gallery Roppongi, expand to the gallery’s Kyobashi location, and then travel to Oslo. We invite you to experience this space created by an artist whose heart embraces life and breath as they expand across inner and outer realms, assuming myriad forms and dimensions in a world of infinite color.

Rei Naito "breath"

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present Daido Moriyama / Sayre Gomez “Hellooooo,” a dialogue between the paintings and sculptures of American artist Sayre Gomez and the photography of Daido Moriyama. Both artists investigate the fundamentals of their respective cities, Los Angeles and Tokyo, which are deeply rooted in their work and represented by their distinct visual languages. Sayre Gomez has garnered recognition for his photorealistic paintings, which focus on fragments of the urban sprawl that is the Los Angeles landscape. His work questions concepts of history, memory, authenticity, and the ways in which we see and make meaning from our lived environment. Since moving from Osaka to Tokyo in his youth, Daido Moriyama has been documenting Shinjuku—the city he describes as “the first place that left him feeling completely at a loss”—for decades, beginning in the 1960s. Moriyama, who admits to being drawn to the “tingling” and chaotic energy of Shinjuku, captures the city’s representations and surfaces through his photography. This relentless pursuit of surface reality becomes the defining characteristic of his artistic practice. 

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