Yosuke Takayama
Solo Exhibition
Return
2024.12.14 (Sat.) - 2025.1.18 (Sat.)
Opening hours：12:00 – 18:00
Closed on Sundays, Mondays, and holidays
*In conjunction with Mio Kaneda Solo Exhibition “Whirlwind in My Ear”
*Gallery will be closed from December 29, 2024 to January 6, 2025 for winter holiday
Opening reception: December 14 (Sat.), 2024, 17:00 – 19:00
* The artist will be present at the reception.
Time to spend with the artists and their works: January 11 (Sat.), 2025, 15:00 – 18:00
©︎Yosuke Takayama
We at ANOMALY are pleased to announce Return, the upcoming solo exhibition of works by Yosuke Takayama. The exhibition will run from December 14 (Sat.), 2024 to January 18 (Sat.), 2025.
Yosuke Takayama has constantly utilized wood as his main material, while also making some use of unusual materials such as coffee cans and newspaper. Taking himself, close friends, people he met by chance, and animals as his models, he has produced many colorful and unique sculptured heads that are abstractions of everyday life from his distinctive perspective. Apart from these sculptures, he has been producing relief carvings emphasizing frontal views and wood-block prints that are self-portraits. He is additionally pursuing new possibilities for sculpture expression in the present, including exploration of new types of pedestals in sculptured works.
Return will be Takayama’s second solo exhibition in ANOMALY, following the first in 2019. It presents two new series, their respective subjects being “cats that suddenly appear, as symbols of existing and not existing,” and “retaining walls separating this world and the other world.” These works were both born of Takayama’s interest in unseen boundaries. The gallery will display about 15 works, including the sculptured heads and large-scale relief carvings about two meters high.
Production of contemporary sculpture has a variety of options to choose from, including digital technology. Takayama nevertheless boldly applies the traditional materials and techniques of woodcarving. We hope you are looking forward to these new works by Takayama, who is taking up the challenge of new concepts in sculpture.
Collected by Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art
In the series of sculptured heads, Takayama adopts cats as the motifs and chose curving black wires for the bottom half of the works in a first attempt. Thus far, he has produced works that take even items that function as boxes for stowing and transporting works, and the pedestals, as parts of those works. The pedestals in this exhibition are composed of black wires in shapes that look too unstable to support the sculptures, and take forms indicating onomatopoeic expressions in Japanese kana (such as pyon and piyu).
The frequent appearance of cats in Takayama’s works in recent years also derives from the fact that he is now keeping a cat, which has become a familiar existence to him. It is also based on numerous incidents in which he perceived sounds in a grassy field as coming from a cat, felt the presence of a cat in the shadows, or saw the figure of a cat that seemed to flash by in the background even while he was looking at a person before him. These works reflect Takayama’s idea, stemming from these experiences, that the coincidence of feelings and memories at the time has a great influence on “seeing,” and that this is linked to the formation of image.
Interest in the difference between “seeing” and “perceiving,” and exploration of the deviation arising in expression of this difference in physical forms, are embodied in his sculptured works.
Right: head #83 (2024) H36xW30xD30cm, Camphorwood, paint, cans, newspaper, water-based urethane paints and plywood ©︎Yosuke Takayama
The newly produced large reliefs displayed in this exhibition take the concrete retaining wall along a narrow and dark boardwalk between Takayama’s studio and house as their motif. On the surface of these works are colorful holes in a random arrangement that impress the viewer with their unique look.
Takayama says that he is beguiled by the eeriness of not being sure whether or not the little round water drainage holes he sees in the retaining wall on the way back from his studio every day are connected somewhere, have something inside them, and, in their irregular arrangement on the inorganic wall, are really in the same place as they were the day before.
retaining wall #1 (2024) H200.3xW151.1xD65cm, Cedar, laminated lumber, paint, newspaper, water-based urethane paints, foldable chairs and water ©︎Yosuke Takayama
The retaining wall and little holes along the sloping path, again changing their appearance.
Above is a house.
On the other side are bushes.
I don’t know how far it continues
But I can hear a sound from deep within.
A stared hard but received no reply.
By the return road, pausing with the hope of signs of something.
– Yosuke Takayama
Yosuke Takayama (b.1980) completed a Master’s degree in sculpture at Tama Art University in 2007. Utilizing wood as his fundamental material for the artworks. His major solo exhibitions include Yosuke Takayama Sculpture Exhibition (second2., Tokyo, 2021), Unknown Sculpture Series No.7 #4 (gallery 21yo-j, Tokyo, 2017), and Nakaniwa (CAPSULE, Tokyo, 2016), Open Studio 66 Yosuke Takayama (Fuchu Art Museum, Tokyo, 2015), UNDER 35 (BankART studio NYK, Kanagawa, Japan, 2015). He has participated in group exhibitions such as 3rd PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale in Kyoto 2022 (Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto, 2022), Encounter – Infinite Variety of Faces (Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan, 2021), Eri Takayanagi x Yosuke Takayama x Masaya Chiba (Tama Art University Art-Theque Gallery, Tokyo, 2017), AKIBATAMABI 21 curated show Eliminating Thought (AKIBATAMABI 21, Tokyo, 2015), COLLECTION+ The act leaves a trace (ARTS MAEBASHI, Gunma, Japan, 2016), Group Show (Tama Art University, Tokyo, 2015), and more.