February 24 – March 30, 2024
Gallery reception: Saturday, February 24 from 2:00 to 5:00 pm
Takako Yamaguchi “Untitled #1” (white and green) Oil on canvas in artist’s plexiglass frame
We are pleased to announce the exhibition “Takako Yamaguchi: Eight Artworks
2009 / 2021,” a presentation of eight never before seen artworks by this veteran
(b. Okayama, Japan 1952) Los Angeles based artist.
Join us for an opening reception on Saturday, February 24 from 2:00 to 5:00 pm. “Takako Yamaguchi: Eight Artworks 2009 / 2021” is presented in conjunction with “Paul Tzanetopoulos: Las Vegas 1972-1975.” Both exhibitions continue through March 30 at as-is.la
To understand a work of art, three questions might be asked of the artist: Where does it come from? How does it work? What does it mean? So when presented with these questions about the works on view in her new show “Takako Yamaguchi: Eight Artworks 2009 / 2021,” the artist has, happily, answers for all three:
Where does it come from?
In 2009 Yamaguchi began a series of photorealistic paintings executed in oil on canvas. The paintings derived from photographs commissioned from Matthew Brandt of a nude model posed to re-enact, however loosely, images figuring prominently in the history of modernist photography. Yamaguchi’s paintings were completed in 2010 and exhibited at the end of that year.
How does it work?
Twelve years later Yamaguchi returned to these paintings with the idea of “redeploying” them—much like artists’ models are themselves deployed and redeployed, posed and re-posed—as part of a new and different series of artworks. To this end, her paintings were then boxed in two kinds of brightly colored plexiglass—a fluorescent pink and a yellow-green—which profoundly changed the experience of these hand painted artifacts, now “trapped in amber,” so to speak.
What does it mean?
Yamaguchi admits to a fondness for gimmicks, particularly when, as here, the gimmick involves setting the industrial into tension with the artisanal; the “quick and easy” (outsourced plexiglass boxes) into tension with the “painfully slow” (exactingly executed photorealistic paintings). Her clever idea proves, however, to be more a starting point than a finish, for each of the resulting artworks generates up a startling richness and visual complexity that, when experienced directly, is far greater than the sum of its component parts.
Takako Yamaguchi received a BA from Bates College in Lewiston Maine in 1975 and a MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1978. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Ortuzar Projects, New York (2023); as-is.la, Los Angeles (2022); Ramiken Crucible, New York (2021); Egan and Rosen, New York (2021) and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles (2021). She has been included in numerous institutional surveys including, most recently, “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2019-2021).
