GALLERY MoMo

Open : Tuesday - Saturday  11am - 7pm / Closed on Sunday, Monday and National holiday

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GALLERY MoMo Ryogoku is pleased to present a solo exhibition "OOtake" by Ryuta Ohtake from Saturday, June 26th through Saturday, July 24th.

 

In this exhibition, Ohtake is going to show his latest paintings themed on circulating energy. Rather than depicting the world in video games or anime characters, the works are like stepping out of it and looking at the world within it from the real world.

 

For Ohtake, video games have been familiar to him since his childhood, and he said, "I used to play with my brother drawing by extracting and reconstructing characters and settings." Video games are the original point of his creation. From his early career, Ohtake depicted artificial objects such as castle walls, dams, and robots from a higher perspective, reminiscent of the screen of Japanese role-playing games. The motifs in his paintings show a unique world by giving the feeling that cannot be replaced with words. 
 

Even though the pretty girls’ portraits like animated characters remind the viewers of the girls by Mr., Ohtake puts the girls in an unrealistic world by employing the cold concrete wall used as the background and the shadows that are distorted unnaturally. Ohtake paints not only girls but also men's portraits. The men in his paintings wear usual clothes and it is more realistic than the girls. It seems that Ohtake describes contrastingly men as real and girls as unreal.  
 

Ryuta Ohtake was born in Osaka in 1976, graduated from the Kyoto City University of Arts in 2000, and received M.A. from the university in 2002.  While studying at the grad school, Ohtake experienced an exchange program at the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. Since his first solo exhibition in 2003, he had solo exhibitions mainly in Kansai area and Tokyo. He participated in group exhibitions at the Sakura City Museum of Art in 2006 and at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007. This is his first solo exhibition at this gallery.

 

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Artist comment

 

“You Are Beautiful,
You Are Beautiful” 
The pattern hearing like that.

 

Ryuta Ohtake, 2021
 

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