Shigeo Otake
Nel mezzo del cammin
Shigeo Otake (1955, Kobe, Japan).
With generous support from Asia Pacific Society for Consortium Museum and Marguo
The Consortium Museum is pleased to announce a landmark two-part survey of Japanese artist Shigeo Otake, marking his first major institutional presence in Europe. Unfolding across two international chapters in 2026, the project follows the narrative arc of the opening line of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” (Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest).
Chapter I: Venice — Nel mezzo del cammin
Presented in the seventeenth-century Palazzo Zon from 4 May to 28 June 2026, the first chapter represents the 'Open Path' of Otake’s artistic maturity. Installed during the opening week of the 61st Venice Biennale, the exhibition features approximately thirty works produced between 1996 and 2025. Through meticulously crafted paintings and profuse compositions inhabited by hybrid creatures and proliferating organic forms, Otake’s work establishes a subtle dialogue with Italian painting of the Trecento and Quattrocento, reactivating its symbolic power through a contemporary Japanese sensibility.
Chapter II: Dijon — Per una selva oscura
The journey continues in July at the Consortium Museum in Dijon as a central component of the L’Almanach 26 biennial. Titled 'Per una selva oscura', this second chapter delves into the 'Dense Forest' of Otake’s foundational origins. While the Venice presentation highlights his technical summit, the Dijon exhibition reveals the fertile 'tangle' of his early years, featuring a selection of historical paintings alongside roughly one hundred drawings, preparatory sketches, and storyboards.
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Shigeo Otake’s oeuvre is distinguished by its unique ability to intermingle multiple realities: blending East and West, tradition and contemporaneity, and the ordinary with the extraordinary. His paintings stage hybrid beings—merging human, faunal, and floral elements—in landscapes that feel immediately familiar.
This sense of “déjà-vu” arises from reminiscences tied to an intimate knowledge of the Italian Renaissance, international surrealism, and the complex compositions of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His work calls to mind a myriad of other references: literary, fungal, folkloric, and religious. The multiplicity of gazes we cast on his paintings augments their possible interpretations; while some see metaphysical landscapes reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico, others find the spirit of Paolo Uccello haunting these compositions.
Shigeo Otake brilliantly accomplishes this balancing act: evoking profound artistic influences while maintaining an immediately recognizable personal mark. During his training at Kyoto City University of Arts, he studied fresco and tempera under Koyi Yamazoe from 1974 to 1981, benefitting from a pervasive enthusiasm for the early Italian Renaissance. Like his predecessors, he embarked on a 'Grand Tour,' visiting France, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, and Italy. These two years of travel allowed him to perfect his understanding of traditional European techniques and amass a vast array of visual memories that he would later reference within his meticulous compositions.
Shigeo Otake’s artistic practice is deeply informed by his interest in fungal life. In his writings, he recounts his discovery of a wild mushroom nearly 40 centimeters tall—the catalyst for his fascination with mycology. Since then, he has devoted much of his research to the study of Cordyceps, parasitic mushrooms that infect and transform their hosts.
Cordyceps appear frequently in his pictorial work, notably in The Birth of Fungal Generation, a short story Otake wrote in the early 2000s. In this text, he imagines a hypothetical future in which Cordyceps turn humans into hybrid beings. Rather than merely depicting the living world, Otake envisions its complete transformation. Once the viewer moves beyond the appeal of his soft colors, the scenes acquire a profound and uncanny aspect.
“My artistic aim has been to blur the boundary between the mundane and the fantastical, painting a realm where the ordinary and the otherworldly coexist.”
— Shigeo Otake
Visit
• Calle Zon 6512, Venezia, Italia
• Open by appointment: communication@consortiummuseum.com
• Exhibition from May 4 to June 28, 2026