Hiroshi Takeda
武田 浩志
Takeda's artistic approach to the genre of portraiture is anything but classical. The artist does not use real people as models for his pictures, nor does he work from memory or with the help of sketches or photographs. Hiroshi Takeda creates painterly likenesses without sitters. The number of these fictitious and chronologically numbered portraits has now risen into the hundreds. The fictitiousness of the portrayed is most evident in the absence of recognizable faces. That they are nonetheless representations of human figures is affirmed by forms that reveal hair, heads, torsos, and arms. Hiroshi Takeda performs an impressive, artistic tightrope act, deftly navigating the boundary between genre conventions of portraiture and autonomous, abstract painting. With his "untitled" series, started in 2017, Takeda moves further away from figuration towards a purely abstract compositions: the playful working method that has generated numerous variations of his fictional portraits over the years has now become the main subject of the artistic work. Takeda detached himself from the question of the genre-specific qualities of his portraits and directed the focus to a far more fundamental one: What is painting?
Positions Berlin Art Fair
September 14-17, 2023
Flughafen Tempelhof (Hanger 6 / Stand A17)
