Tetsuya Ishida

Nick Simunovic, senior director of Gagosien in Asia, commented: “I’ve been captivated by Ishida’s work since first being introduced to it over fifteen years ago. On the fiftieth anniversary of his birth, we are honored to present his paintings in New York. With a significant selection of over eighty works out of just over two hundred that Ishida created during his lifetime, this exhibition offers a chance for a new audience to encounter his extraordinary oeuvre.”

In his catalogue essay, Diethard Leopold, cofounder and curator of the Leopold Museum, Vienna, and a former psychotherapist, examines Ishida’s frequent use of his own face in his paintings. This notably un-Japanese strategy is applied, he argues, not for the purposes of self-portraiture, but instead as a tool for critical observation of the common “salaryman.” Leopold characterizes the motif as an instance of the psychoanalytical meeting the sociological and traces this form of self-portraiture in Ishida’s oeuvre through various categories of image, all of which are represented in Alemani’s selection for the exhibition in New York.

My Anxious Self is divided into five thematic parts, each of which occupies a separate room in the gallery. “Waiting for a Chance” explores ideas of estrangement and the loss of self through images of assembly lines and regimented worker-consumers. Many of the paintings in this grouping also depict people fused with or partially transformed into machines; Interview (1998), for example, reimagines a trio of interviewers as enormous microscopes preparing to examine a hapless candidate. Another section, “Helpless Metamorphoses,” features works portraying human bodies comingled with animals or objects, strongly recalling the oneiric themes of Surrealism but augmenting that movement’s rangy probing of the unconscious psyche with a social critique specific to Ishida’s millennial time and place.

“Desperately Lonely” focuses on scenes of solitude and isolation set in built interiors that are often also being invaded by nature or merging in other ways with the outside world. In Plant-Eating Dragon (2004), for example, a curled-up man surrounded by drug paraphernalia wraps himself in a blanket that takes the form of a grassy field dotted with trees and crisscrossed by dirt paths. Another section, “Neo-Tokyo,” concentrates on cityscapes and urban exteriors, additionally featuring source materials for Ishida’s work such as movies, news broadcasts, and the artist’s favorite manga and anime. Finally, “Restless Dream” comprises paintings dominated by haunting images of maternity and childhood, dreams and death. In Characters (2003), a naked figure—as ever, it could be the artist’s own—lies on a white bed surrounded by falling leaves. Within his body, four progressively smaller and paler versions are nested, matryoshka style, the smallest one sitting up as if ready to take its leave.

The exhibition catalogue features an introduction by Michiaki Ishida, a foreword by Larry Gagosien, essays by Alemani and Leopold, and “The Red Cocoon,” a short story about a surreal metamorphosis by award-winning Japanese writer Kobo Abe.