Aya Takano has visions: colorful, crystal-clear images that appear suddenly before her eyes. They began in high school, when the captivating but distracting scenes posed a challenge to her schoolwork and social life. Now, at 48, she still sees them, but much less frequently. “I really have to concentrate, and I have to sketch it on paper very quickly before I lose it,” she said on the morning of her solo exhibition, “how deep how far can we go,” opening at Perrotin Los Angeles, where it runs through August 29th.
Inspired by the science fiction and manga comic books in her father’s library, Takano has been drawing since childhood. After graduating from the art program at Tama Art University in Tokyo, she worked as an assistant to Takashi Murakami, the founder of the contemporary anime-inspired art movement Superflat. Shortly after participating in Murakami’s landmark exhibition, “Superflat,” in 2000, she was offered her first solo show with Perrotin. Since 2003, Takano has had 11 exhibitions with the gallery across six different countries. Institutional shows, six-figure auction sales, and collaborations with renowned fashion designers such as Issey Miyake have established Takano as the preeminent female figure in the Superflat art movement. As the artist shifted her practice to reflect her exploration of humanity’s relationship to the earth, “how deep how far we can go” represents her most profound and spiritual vision to date.
For Takano, creativity and spirituality are indistinguishable. This revelation came to her in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the east coast of Japan, along with the Fukushima nuclear plant. In an effort to reimagine humanity’s relationship with nature, she began studying sacred texts, practicing yoga, meditating, and reading across various scientific disciplines. This experience gradually transformed her perspective on life, art, and the more-than-human world.
Takano’s distinct drawing style combines stylistic elements of anime with ukiyo-e—traditional woodblock printing—and nihonga, a Japanese painting technique from the early 20th century that uses traditional pigments, ink, and other materials. But the inspiration for this show appeared to her while she was meditating in a hot spring. “I saw plants, insects, minerals, animals,” she said. “All the life forms on earth, past, present, and future, were together coexisting.” This theme is visible throughout the works in her Perrotin show. There are technicolor oil paintings full of flowering plants, birds, and mammals along the walls and on canvases suspended midair.
Several cardboard cutouts are scattered throughout the space, including one of a towering palm tree, another of a purple, prehistoric fungus, and yet another of an airplane with a human face that hangs from the ceiling. A dotted mural of a double helix wraps around the gallery, which, Takano explained, symbolizes the DNA that holds the information and memories from the time we were in the womb: “If we can access this, we may be able to journey all the way back to a place that feels like the very source of life.”
The artist offers her family history as a starting point in the two paintings on either side of the entrance: beginning, mother (2025) and beginning, father (2025). The former depicts two female figures with large eyes and elongated limbs who represent the artist’s mother and grandmother. On the other side, the painting shows two more figures, representing her father and grandfather. The symmetrical geometric symbols included in both compositions are devotional mandalas thought to hold cosmic power and provide guidance on a journey.
This movement back in time is especially evident in from present to past, a journey to the center (2025). This work is an eight-foot-long landscape collaged with motifs from different time periods: a car dashboard, the façade of a convenience store, pillars from a Mesopotamian ruin, and ancient cave drawings. A close-up of one female figure reveals the braids, tattoos, and jewelry typical of someone at a music festival. Another figure performs a yoga backbend across the center of the composition.
Similarly, the paintings suspended in the middle of the room portray human characters from across history living in harmony with their environments. The sinewy figure in in asia, former rice-farming culture (2025) holds above her head a wooden tea ceremony tray stacked with red-striped cups. Surrounding her are lush green rice paddy fields filled with blossoming flowers, grazing horses, and a large praying mantis. Another canvas, the hill of göbekli tepe (2025), shows a shaman-esque youth encircled by animals—among them flamingos, rabbits, snakes, and a hawk. In her feathered crown, floral collar, and beaded jewelry, the character appears to be from everywhere and nowhere in a world without borders.
The doe-eyed ingénues featured throughout the show are central to Takano’s work. Characterized by slim bodies, bulbous heads, and oblong eyes, they’re often depicted in the nude with pink circles around their knees and elbows. Although they possess feminine features, the artist perceives them as manifestations of energy closer to spirits than to bodies. “Our spirits are undifferentiated,” says Takano. “Inside, we’re all potential.”
Although human figures appear across her work, Takano is especially interested in how we coexist with animals. “We are equal,” Takano said. “We are nature and nature is us.” This is perhaps most obvious in the painting in africa, a person lives a life being one with a cow (2025). This large composition portrays a human figure reclining among various creatures—a lamb, a billy goat, a duck, a cat, and a cow—and foliage, including oversized palm fronds, oranges, mushrooms, melons, and ferns. For Takano, it’s part of her responsibility as an artist to show her audience alternative ways to interact with nature. The world presented in this exhibition is not an escape from reality, but rather a fantastical vision of the future. “Think about skyscrapers,” she said. “They were once only a fantasy inside someone’s head.”
Takano’s latest work builds on her spiritual practice of yoga. In particular, she is inspired by her understanding of the chakras, which she describes as the body’s “spinning wheels of energy.” This is why, in the second, smaller gallery, there are seven square paintings, one for each chakra, in luxe, tufted velvet frames. In each, a miniature figure demonstrates a different yoga pose against a backdrop of jewel-tone patterns and botanical motifs. Natural mats are arranged on the floor in the gallery for viewers to try a pose or take a moment to rest. “This is my invitation,” said Takano. “Come join me on this journey toward the heart.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/rcy3lk0
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