2014 Catalogue Archive

Dynamic, strange, and innovative, Shinro Ohtake’s work encompasses painting, sculpture, collage, photography, experimental music, and video. Ohtake’s work is influenced by sources as diverse as surrealism, Pop art, underground music, urban life, debris, and mass media images. Ohtake’s Retina series began when the artist was using the traditional Polaroid process where the photograph is peeled off its protective sheet, leaving a faint negative that is thrown away as a result. Ohtake continued to build on this exploration into photographic processes, chemicals, and ways of seeing to create larger works, seen here in Retina #24. The resulting works exist at a bizarre intersection of painting and photography, or of chemical and image. His work is held in numerous public collections, including Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, Naoshima; and MoMA, New York. Ohtake’s work was include in dOCUMENTA (13), and an extensive presentation of Ohtake’s Scrapbooks was shown in the 2013 Venice Biennale. In 2014, he was awarded one of Japan’s most prestigious art awards – The Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Minister’s Award for Fine Arts 2013-2014 – in recognition of his outstanding contribution following exhibitions held in Japan and internationally in the previous year.