Otake studied oil and mural painting at Kyoto City University of Arts in the mid-1970s, formative years during which the artist was first exposed to works from the Early Italian Renaissance. It was this deep admiration for Renaissance painting that inspired him to master egg tempera in the ensuing decades, a medium as celebrated then as it is now for its lustrous colours and water-resistant finish. Directly inspired by his formal training and art history education, Otake went on to refine his skills in painting, a practice later enriched by his travels across Europe, during which time he encountered first-hand the masterpieces he had long revered. Moving off the canvas and into expansive, mural-scale works, Otake’s work again evokes the great works of Renaissance art through his use of strappo, a technique devised to detach and preserve frescoes. Translating from the Italian as ‘tear’ or ‘pull’, strappo involves a painstaking and precarious process of transfer, one usually undertaken by skilled art conservationists.
The artist’s meticulously choreographed paintings are syncretic in both nature and form. While Otake’s practice engages with art techniques developed in the West, his visual language calls to mind imagery from a wide range of sources. Characterised by its teeming, detailed scenes and cast of charismatic creatures, the artist’s work evokes the apocalyptic gardens of Hieronymus Bosch as much as it does Yūrei-zu, a genre of Japanese art depicting ghosts, demons and spirits. Whether painting sprawling landscapes or enclosed domestic scenes, however, Otake’s visions all serve as reflections on contemporary society. While his paintings appear to issue a strange, alternative world, they are at the same time centred on paradigms of human activity – whether socio-economic, political or ecological – activity that is recognisably ours.
The ingenuity of Otake’s work lies in how it brings the absurdity of human relations to the fore. A vendor sells himself; consumers become the consumed; and figures desire or devour miniature or mirrored versions of themselves. Plant Market (2011), for example, features a flower-headed street-seller trading small, potted plants. Elsewhere, This Place is Connected to the Sea (1997) features creaturely visitors peering into zoological displays, painfully estranged from the world to which they belong. Otake’s Mermaid Scooping (2023) shows amphibious children crowded around a tank with small mermaids, a reference to a children’s fair game in Japan that involves the catching of goldfish. In a gesture of wry humour, Otake often includes an easily identifiable human girl in a red dress in his compositions; a bystander, witness and messenger, she watches on with curiosity and interest.
Unified by a palette in which ochres predominate, the artist’s seemingly timeless scenes contend that the subjects he represents are not only contemporary, but also long-standing and age-old. In a more recent body of work, Otake turned his attention to the Greek ‘agora’, the marketplace of ancient times whose rituals and customs are still pervasive today. There, Otake portrays human and non-human entities caught up in the cadence of an everyday life structured by movement and exchange. Painting the marketplace and its many textures, the artist considers the systems of circulation, the logic of consumerism and the dynamics of reciprocity that have shaped human history. Be it through casual, everyday interactions or a specific set of social codes, Otake’s paintings offer a view into the overlooked aspects of human nature. At the very same time, his work seeks to envisage moments of collective participation and interspecies harmony, revealing all the ways in which human assembly is just another form of organic growth.
Shigeo Otake (b. 1955, Kobe, Japan) lives and works in Kobe, Japan. Otake received a BFA and an MFA from the Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan, between 1979 and 1981. In 2026, The Consortium Museum presents a two-part exhibition of his works across Venice and Dijon, marking the artist’s first major European institutional presentation. Recent gallery solo exhibitions include White Cube Hong Kong (2026); American Art Catalogues, New York (2025); Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2025) and Beijing (2023); and ADZ Gallery, Lisbon (2024). His work has also been featured in major group exhibitions internationally, including Whitechapel Gallery, London (2026); Shibunkaku, Tokyo (2026); Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, London (2025); He Art Museum, Foshan, China (2025); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2025); and Gladstone, New York (2024), among others.
