IBASHO is proud to present Ryudai Takano’s solo exhibition. With this exhibition Takano and IBASHO intend to show the public the essence and versatility of Takano’s oeuvre. Takano (1963, Fukui) has been engaged in his artistic practice on the theme of nudity and sexuality since the beginnings of the 1990s.
In the series ca.ra.ma.ru (1993-1996) on display at IBASHO Takano wanted to express a beauty of the human body that transcends normal images of man and woman. He asked the models, butoh dancers, to get entwined (which is the meaning of the Japanese word caramaru). The results are aesthetically beautiful works of human nakedness.
Reclining Woo-Man (1997-2001) shows a very different picture of nudeness. The title comes from “Reclining Woman” that is a title often found among European classical paintings. The title is a parody, but the photos are not. Takano was exploring how to capture his own sense of beauty when he used the last shots of a film for taking images of his friend, Kikuo, a stout, naked, middle-aged man, while he was lying on a sofa bed. Takano felt he had to make a series of his friend, because he wanted to show a type of a nude body that had been ignored in art.
The images of the series ‘With me’ (2002 - 2010) were initially made as a colour check of each body. Takano thought that the difference in skin colour would be clearly in comparison with his own skin colour, if his subject and he were taken together. In 2009, when he was looking through his body of work, he reconsidered and decided to show them as artworks, showing Takano’s relationships with others through nude self-portraits of them and himself.
Takano’s exhibition includes a selection of images from his large project ‘Daily Snapshots’. Since 1998 Takano has made a photograph every day, in order to make his act of photographing an everyday happening and to try to regard a camera as a part of his body offering the viewer a peek into his daily life.
