Tetsuya Ishida | Online Exclusives | Fairs & Collecting

Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) came of age as a painter during Japan’s “lost decade”—a time of nationwide economic recession that lasted through the 1990s. In his afflictive paintings, he captured the feelings of hopelessness, claustrophobia, and emotional isolation that burdened him and dominated Japanese society. Throughout his career, Ishida provided vivid allegories of the challenges to Japanese life and morale in paintings and graphic works charged with dark Orwellian absurdity.

Launched in 2020, Artist Spotlight is presented once a month as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight highlights a work by an individual artist—made available exclusively online for forty-eight hours—together with new editorial features and selected archival content.

Artist Spotlight: Tetsuya Ishida features a significant late painting by the artist. For for more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.

Photo: © Tetsuya Ishida, courtesy Estate of Tetsuya Ishida

From the Quarterly

Nostalgia and Apocalypse

In conjunction with My Anxious Self, the most comprehensive survey of paintings by the late Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) to have been staged outside of Japan and the first-ever exhibition of his work in New York, Gagosian hosted a panel discussion. Here, Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities at Harvard University, delve into the societal context in which Ishida developed his work, in a conversation moderated by exhibition curator Cecilia Alemani.

Tetsuya Ishida: My Weak Self, My Pitiful Self, My Anxious Self

The largest exhibition of the Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida’s work ever mounted in the United States will open at Gagosian, New York, in September 2023. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the show tracks the full scope of Ishida’s career. In this excerpt from Alemani’s essay in the exhibition catalogue, she contextualizes Ishida’s paintings against the background of a fraught era in Japan’s history and investigates the work’s enduring relevance in our own time.

Tetsuya Ishida’s Nihilist Realism

Mika Yoshitake details the economic, psychological, and cultural conditions that gave rise to Tetsuya Ishida’s unique strain of Japanese postwar realism.

Tetsuya Ishida: Painter of Modern Life

Yūko Hasegawa explores the fantastical convergences and amalgamations in Tetsuya Ishida’s paintings, their connections to manga and advertising imagery, and the shift that occurred in the artist’s work as he moved from acrylic to oil paint in 2000.