Kazuyuki Takezaki, a painter whose blurry, washed-out landscapes made him a intently watched artist of Japan’s artwork scene, has died at 48 after a coronary heart assault. Jeffrey Rosen, cofounder of Takezaki’s Tokyo-based consultant Misako & Rosen, confirmed the artist’s loss of life and mentioned his gallery was working to determine an property for Takezaki.
Takezaki died simply weeks after the closure of his first main New York solo exhibition, at 47 Canal gallery. That present featured current work of bushes, mountains, greenery, and extra that he noticed in Marugame, the seaside metropolis in Japan the place he was primarily based.
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These work, with their kinds that soften into abstraction, attest to a pure world that’s slipping away, provided that artifical industrial interventions now pose a big menace to the realm round Marugame. “Speaking a profound but fleeting sense of place, Takezaki’s home windows onto this consistently shifting atmosphere are additionally reflections on time, reminiscence, and the porous overlaps between topic and object,” Andrew Maerkle wrote in an essay accompanying the 47 Canal present.
The 47 Canal present was one of many few exhibitions Takezaki had held within the US. In Japan, he had constructed a big resume, with solo exhibits held on the Kochi Museum of Artwork and Misako & Rosen.
He was born in Kochi, Japan, in 1976, and his birthplace would proceed to loom giant over his apply. “Such a mix, that of the pure and synthetic inside this city so stuffed with risk and prompts my creativeness,” he wrote in an exhibition textual content for a 2008 Misako & Rosen exhibition.
Takezaki went on to attend Kochi College. Then, upon commencement in 1999, he relocated to Tokyo, the place he targeted on constructing out his inventive apply.
Early on, Takezaki’s artwork appeared in group exhibits held by blue-chip galleries, resembling New York’s Yvon Lambert and Tokyo’s Ota High quality Arts. But it surely was a gallery of Takezaki’s making that helped earn his place within the Japanese scene: Takefloor, which he launched inside his small Tokyo condo.
Kazuyuki Takezaki, Board / Desk, 2023.
Courtesy Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, and 47 Canal, New York
Jeffrey Rosen, Takezaki’s seller, credited Takefloor with appearing as a catalyst for experimental artwork within the Japanese artwork scene. Rosen credited Takefloor with inspiring him to open Misako & Rosen, telling Artspace in 2015 that Takezaki’s gallery “gave all people of our technology the braveness to start out opening up our personal house.”
After working in Tokyo for a interval, Takezaki returned to Kochi, then moved to Marugame. Within the latter metropolis, he started making his “Board / Desk” work, for which he would connect a canvas to a board, then drive past town with it. In view of mountains and bushes, he would depict what he noticed in oil stick, working shortly in an try and make everlasting all this nature in flux over the course of a number of days. A few of these works appeared this 12 months at 47 Canal and in 2023 at Milwaukee’s Inexperienced Artwork Gallery, in his first US solo present.
Although they began out figural, these items shortly dissolved into blobs of muted coloration. “At nightfall,” Takezaki as soon as remarked, “I usually see the city horizontally divided into higher and decrease halves by clear and opaque coloration.”