Yuji Takeoka's ninth solo exhibition at the Konrad Fischer Galerie features a remarkable collection of six works created between 1987 and 2011, showcasing his expertise in working with terracotta, cast stone, and bronze.
Takeoka showcases his socles, pedestals, shelves, and wall elements in an extremely minimalistic and reduced style, with each one appearing almost independent and empty. This emptiness, however, embodies not only the absence of something, an object or a work of art. Where there is seemingly nothing - on the pedestals, on the shelves, and in the space in between - space is intentionally kept free for an intensive aesthetic discourse, for the examination of the artistic concept.
Mindful of the essence of things and their simplicity, Takeoka succeeds in translating his own language of reduction into a harmonious coexistence of forms and colors, thus defining the entire space itself as a walk-in sculpture. In a sense, a paradoxical space that visualizes the act of exhibiting, even though almost nothing is actually shown.
Yuji Takeoka born 1946 in Kyoto, Japan, lives and works in Düsseldorf. Between 1995 and 2013, Takeoka was a professor at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, including the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2016), the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama (2016), the Toyama Memorial Museum, Saitama (2016), the Josef Albers Museum, Quadrat, Bottrop (2011), the Gerhard Marcks Haus in Bremen (2012), and the Kunstvereine in Stuttgart, Münster, and Düsseldorf. Konrad Fischer Gallery has exhibited his work since 1986.
Takeoka participated in Documenta IX (1992) and has exhibited his work in major survey exhibitions of Minimal and Conceptual Art, including Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2021), Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2015), National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (all 2001).
His work is in the collections of the National Museum of Art, Osaka; Chiba Museum of Art, Japan; S.M.A.K., Ghent; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen; and the collections of Deutsche Bank and Daimler Contemporary.
