Shigeo Otake

L'Almanach 26 : Shigeo Otake "Per una selva oscura"

Shigeo Otake (1955, Kobe, Japan)

Exhibition Lead Supports: Asia Pacific Society for Consortium Museum, Daniel Xu & Flora Huang Foundation, Chloe Chiu & Liu Bin Ouyang Feng and Marguo

The Consortium Museum is organizing a two-part exhibition dedicated to the Japanese artist Shigeo Otake, marking his first major institutional presentation in Europe. The first is presented in Venice from May 4 to June 28, 2026, the second at the Consortium Museum, in “L’Almanach 26”. 

Shigeo Otake’s work stands out for its unique ability to make multiple realities coexist: the West and Asia, tradition and contemporaneity, nature and culture, the ordinary and the extraordinary. His paintings feature hybrid beings—a cross between humans, fauna and flora—in landscapes that immediately appear familiar to us. This feeling of “déjà vu” springs from reminiscences related to our personal knowledge of art history.

For example, the work Kamogawa Spring Scenery depicts hybrid beings strolling along the banks of the Kamogawa River in Kyoto, while they mimic the positions of characters in Georges Seurat’s canvases Une baignade à Asnières [Bathers at Asnières] (1883-1884), or Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte [A Sunday on La Grande Jatte] (1884-1886). Shigeo Otake accomplishes this balancing act brilliantly: calling to mind artistic influences while making his own immediately recognisable personal mark.

The multiplicity of gazes we cast on his paintings augments their interpretations. While some viewers see obvious references to Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical landscapes—like Night of the Great Tide—and figures recalling those by Victor Brauner, for others, it is the spirit of Paolo Uccello—in Visit, for instance—and European painters from the Renaissance to the modern period that haunt his compositions. In several paintings, like Inset Sumo and Amanita Club, we find the checkerboard floor, a trope in Johannes Vermeer’s genre scenes.

The influence of European painting goes beyond mere iconographic allusions; Shigeo Otake also adopts techniques inherited from the Italian Renaissance, such as egg tempera, which he learned in Koji Yamazoe’s studio during his training at Kyoto City University of the Arts from 1974 to 1981.  

The Japanese painter makes reference to a myriad of sources in his works: literary, folkloric, religious, fungal, etc. His artistic practice is especially informed by his interest in fungal life. Since 1985, subsequent to his discovery of a wild mushroom about 40 centimeters in height, he devotes much of his research to cordyceps, parasitical mushrooms that infect insects, leading to their death. With these studies as a point of departure, he incorporates the depictions of these elements into his paintings and imagines a hypothetical future in which deadly mushrooms have subjugated and turned human beings into hybrid beings. 

Shigeo Otake does not merely represent the living world, he reconfigures it. Once we have moved beyond the appeal of his soft colors and our delight in these little beings, the scenes playing out right under our eyes become loaded with a sense of uncanniness.