Ryuta Ohtake “OOtake”

Gallery Momo Ryogoku

Finished

Artists

Ryuta Ohtake

Ryuta Otake was born in Osaka in 1976 and graduated from the Kyoto City University of Arts in 2000, followed by a graduate degree in painting in 2002. He participated in a group exhibition at Sakura City Museum of Art in 2006 and at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007.

For Otake, video games have been a part of his life since childhood, and he says, “I used to play with my siblings, extracting and reconstructing characters and settings, talking and drawing with them.” Since the early days of his career, he has drawn man-made objects such as castle walls, dams, and robots from a bird’s eye view, reminiscent of the screens of Japanese role-playing games.

Ohtake’s portraits of people that look like anime characters are reminiscent of the anime-style beautiful girls that he draws, but the cold concrete walls used as the background distort the shadows of the people in a way that diminishes the sense of reality. She sometimes depicts not only girls but also men, dressed in clothes that are closer to the real world than those of girls, giving the impression that she sees men as real and women as from the unreal world, and that she is drawing them in contrast.

In this exhibition, she will be showing new work on the theme of circulating energy. Rather than depicting the world in a video game or an anime character, the work is like stepping out of it and looking at the world within it from the real world.

Schedule

Jun 26 (Sat) 2021-Jul 24 (Sat) 2021