Kazuyuki Takezaki (1976-2024)

Japanese artist Kazuyuki Takezaki, known for his hazy, minimalist landscapes, died on June 22 of a heart attack. He was forty-eight. His death was announced by Misako & Rosen, the Tokyo gallery that represented him, on June 24. Only beginning to gain recognition in the United States, Takezaki was a central figure in Japan’s contemporary art scene, having become deeply imbricated within that world after opening a gallery in his tiny Tokyo apartment in the early aughts. Inspired by his chosen surrounds, Takezaki’s works explored themes of nature’s ephemerality in the face of increasing industrialization. “Kazuyuki Takezaki, or Jiro, as he was known to his friends, was an incredibly unassuming and generous person who managed, over a period of two decades, to exert—both as an artist and curator—an inestimable influence on the contemporary art world in Japan,” wrote Misako & Rosen cofounder Jeffrey Rosen in an email toArtnet News.

Kazuyuki Takezaki was born in the coastal capital city of Kochi on Shikoku Island, the smallest of Japan’s major islands, in 1976. After obtaining his degree from Kochi University in 1999, he moved to Tokyo to pursue his career as an artist. He participated in his first group shows in 2000, at the city’s Ueno Royal Museum and at Ota Fine Arts, where he would later work from 2004 to 2007. Around this time, he opened the gallery Takefloor in his own apartment, in the Ebisu district; the space quickly gained a reputation for showing experimental work by Japanese artists and was later remembered by Rosen as catalyzing the opening of a number of new galleries. In 2008, Takezaki collaborated with Atsuko Ninagawa to establish the now internationally well-regarded Take Ninagawa, which remains a lodestar of Tokyo’s contemporary art scene. He left the gallery in 2009 to focus on his own practice, initially returning to Kochi and then moving across the island to Marugame, on the edge of the Seto Inland Sea.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Takezaki’s work took the form of “small mixed-media paintings featuring large swathes of blank space punctuated by odd scribbles and gestures, rendered faintly in pencil or pen with occasional touches of color,” as described by Andrew Maerkle in a piece written to accompany the artist’s 2024 solo exhibition at 47 Canal in New York. Collage and sculpture, too played a part in his oeuvre, as did actual vegetation, which was included along with a lamp, a floral carpet, and a handful of paintings in his 2008 show BIO TOPOS at Misako & Rosen. Following the move to Marugame, his palette became more muted, his scenes mistier as he attempted to portray in his works invisible elements such as climate and atmosphere. A 2016 show at Misako & Rosen, “Heaven Hill,” named for a brand of bottom-shelf bourbon, included woodblock prints, and presented canvases draped over rods rather than stretched.

In 2020, Takezaki embarked on the series “Board/Table,” for which he placed a piece of canvas atop a wooden panel that he then spun freely while working with an oil stick to depict whatever landscape he stood within. “The simple, rushed brushstrokes and the controlled, modest colors create a unique microcosm where tenderness and solidity reside in harmony, as the images move back and forth between the boundary of representation and abstraction,” wrote Hori Motoaki in a 2023 catalogue accompanying Takezaki’s show at the train station in Saanen, Switzerland hosted by Marc Jancou Contemporary.

The subject of a 2007 presentation by Maerkle at artist Andrew Guenther’s Brooklyn storefront space Arts Tropical, Takezaki enjoyed his first US solo show in 2023, at Milwaukee’s Green Gallery; the exhibition of his work at 47 Canal closed weeks before his death. Takezaki’s works are held in the collections of the Fondazione Fiera Milano; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; the Museum of Art, Kochi; and the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, Japan.