DAICHI TAKAGI

Artist bio

Narrative Grids
April 1 - 30, 2017
Opening reception: Saturday, April 1, 6pm -
* Joint party with the group show"Spring Fever" at Komagome SOKO next door.

Held at the same time: Pattern, Quiet, Repeat, Simple April 6 - 22, 2017 switch point, Tokyo

DAICHI TAKAGI　Composition with Blue and Red　2017, oil on canvas, 33.3 x 66.6

KAYOKOYUKI is pleased to announce the solo exhibition with Daichi Takagi. He was born in 1982 in Gifu, Japan.
Recently, Takagi presented his work in "Periphery" at Foundation B.a.d, Rotterdam, 2016, "COOL INVITATIONS 2" at XYZ Collective, Tokyo, 2015, "The Way of Painting" at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, 2014, "DAI CHU SHOW" recent abstract" at Fuchu art museum citizen's gallery and LOOPHOLE, Tokyo, 2013, "SSS-expand painting" at MISAKO & ROSEN, Tokyo, 2010. Lives and works in Kanagawa.
http://daichitakagi.com/index.php

This exhibition brings together Daichi Takagi’s new paintings created with influences from things he encountered in 2016 while participating in an artist-in-residence program in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He developed those paintings drawing inspiration from concrete forms of things in the city such as tiles covering exterior walls, patterns on people’s clothes, ads and printed matters, and rhythmic structures of various architectural styles. In his painterly practice, Takagi often starts with visual inputs that he perceives and experiences almost purely aesthetically from things in foreign cultures, making the best use of his status as a non-native, complete outsider, which he then reinterprets and recomposes into new forms. This attitude also reflects his strategy on how an artist like him, living and working in Japan today, can gain access to the long and rich history of painting in the West.

One of the new pieces presented in the exhibition, Composition (De Hooch) (2017, oil on canvas, 213 × 45.5cm), which consists of five vertically-connected canvases, was conceived inspired by Card Players in a Sunlit Room, one of the representative works by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch, where the forms of the tiles on the floor, the patterns of the lace curtain over the window, and the decorative wall of the building seen outside the door, among others, serve to create a visual rhythm over the canvas. The 17th century brought great prosperity to the Netherlands and during this period, called the Dutch Golden Age, a vast amount of rare and valuable items came from all over the world to the country, which informed Dutch artists to develop Dutch art epochally, noteworthily genre paintings depicting interior scenes. Some of the everyday household objects depicted in those paintings are apparently decorated in Asian-originated ways, an obvious evident that Western and Eastern designs had already started to be conflated with each other. This history has nurtured people’s rich sensibility and mentality in the Netherlands and it has served as the basis for the vivid colors and simple compositions in various visual expressions of Dutch artists, which is still discreetly integrated in every detail of everyday scenes of the country today.

In the era of Modernism, while “narrative” was a disesteemed term, “grids” were regarded as a fundamental element that supports painting’s autonomy and essentiality. The title of this exhibition, which combines these two opposing words, speaks of the artist’s way of making paintings, where our sentiment and humanity that are surely in the realm of everyday life are translated into abstract forms and colors, and also reflects his wish to draw closer to the sensibility that he wants to achieve.