Tetsuya Ishida Exhibition
The Gagosian Gallery is currently exhibiting a selection of work by Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida. His large format Acrylic paintings depict a series of strange and sometimes disturbing images of people spliced with a variety of objects and animals.
Waiting for a Chance (1999) depicts young men in a hospital room, anxiously awaiting their fate as they rest on scrapped auto bodies in place of hospital beds. The striking allegory Descendant (1999), also set in a hospital, portrays a group of surgeons surrounding a child who has been birthed by prehistoric reptiles. In Exercise Equipment (1997), a recurring suited subject is pictured running on a treadmill, monitored by men positioned to hook his ankles should he slow down. These nightmarish scenes are consistent with the surreal melancholy of contemporary Japanese authors such as Mahoko Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami, whose novels propose a society of individuals debilitated by neurosis and traumatic dysfunction.
Speaking about his work the artist himself says:
“At first, it was a self-portrait. I tried to make myself—my weak self, my pitiful self, my anxious self—into a joke or something funny that could be laughed at…It was sometimes seen as a parody or satire referring to contemporary people. As I continued to think about this, I expanded it to include consumers, city-dwellers, workers, and the Japanese people.”
Tetsuya Ishida was born in Yaizu, Shizuoka, Japan in 1973, and died in Tokyo in 2005.
The exhibition runs until December 21st.
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