Hisachika Takahashi, an artist who garnered a following in New York whereas serving as an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, has died at 85. His demise was introduced by Misako & Rosen, a Tokyo-based gallery that collaborated with Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery on a present present for the artist on the latter house.
Takahashi remained a comparatively obscure determine for years, regardless of his shut connections to artists well-known within the West. He served as an assistant to Lucio Fontana earlier than becoming a member of Rauschenberg’s studio and enlisted Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Gordon Matta-Clark, and others to assist on a undertaking known as From Reminiscence Draw a Map of the US, for which he had his collaborators do exactly that. He even received Meals, the famed artist-run restaurant in New York, to place sushi and sashimi on the menu—a gesture that was, on the time, uncommon for an eatery within the metropolis.
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Previously decade, nonetheless, Takahashi had emerged as an artist’s artist. The photographer Yuki Okumura, for instance, recalled seeing Takahashi’s artwork in a warehouse after which went on to guide efforts to carry Takahashi’s work to the broader public, serving to exhibit it at venues such because the WIELS Centre for Modern Artwork in Brussels and the Fondazione Prada in Milan.
Born in 1940 in Tokyo, Takahashi bought a sculpture to the Japanese metropolis of Yokosuka and used the funds to purchase a visit by cargo boat to Italy. In Venice, he linked up with Fontana.
All of the whereas, Takahashi was engaged on a gaggle of items often called his “flower work,” which concerned making use of photographs of flowers to canvas painted in neon shades. When Takahashi exhibited these works in 1967 and Huge White House in Antwerp, Fontana remarked that the present “secures his inventive future.”
Takahashi got here to the US in 1969 and remained an assistant to Rauschenberg till the artist died in 2008. Takahashi’s duties included overseeing Rauschenberg’s SoHo studio and caring for the artist’s animals and vegetation.
The artists’ work was in some methods conversant: very similar to Rauschenberg, Takahashi additionally produced items that likewise concerned clipped materials from mass media that he then collaged collectively.
“Studio assistant, artwork handler, conservator, gardener, cook dinner, handy-man, in-house safety guard, and consummate artist, Hisachika Takahashi was a pressure to be reckoned with and will probably be missed,” the Robert Rauschenberg Basis wrote in an announcement this week. “We lengthen our deepest sympathies to Agathe Gonnet, Hummingbird Takahashi, and Hisachika’s household and pals.”
