Take Ninagawa Presents Shinro Ohtake’s Retina Series
Leading Tokyo gallery Take Ninagawa will present a solo exhibition by Shinro Ohtake this fall and winter. Born in Tokyo in 1955, Ohtake is a prolific contemporary artist known for his densely layered collages and unique, multidimensional visual language. Often utilizing found objects, ephemera, magazines and more, Ohtake crafts textured worlds at once familiar and surreal, orderly and chaotic. His works explore themes of memory, nostalgia and identity.
Ohtake has been producing the “Retina” series since the 1980s, inspired by exposed test film meant to be discarded. Stretching the traces of light remaining on the film then coating it with a urethane resin, he created two distinct elements — the plane of the photographic image and the transparent coating — which are unified through the viewer’s retina as a new image. These compositions are studies on the mechanisms of perception, shifting with photographic chemical reactions and the effects of time.
