Tetsuya Ishida

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005). The first exhibition dedicated to the artist’s work in France, Tetsuya Ishida opens on June 10 at 4 rue de Ponthieu.

Ishida came of age during Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, an era that saw a severe, long-lasting recession accompanied by social challenges and economic displacement that significantly affected his generation. The scenarios in Ishida’s vivid, hyper-detailed paintings address those travails, their absurdities resonating on both psychological and sociological levels.

Many of Ishida’s protagonists are young people or working-age men with blank expressions, their generic anonymity recalling René Magritte’s bowler-hatted figures. Isolated and desperate, they face bizarre, dreamlike situations and are often subject to mechanical or animalistic metamorphoses. Drawing on Social Realism, Surrealism, and Japanese popular culture, Ishida’s wildly imaginative works are powerful symbols of the loss of individual agency in a society organized around work, consumption, and technological dependency.