Exhibition Period: 4th June (Saturday) – 4th September (Sunday), 2016
Mon-Sat 11:00-20:00 (Last entry 19:30),
Sun 11:00-19:00 (Last entry 18:30)
Open daily,
Free admission
Venue： Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum
（8F, 5-4-1 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan
TEL: 03-3569-3300）
Organized by： Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Supported by： MISAKO & ROSEN
Le Forum is proud to present the exhibition Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura. Yuki Okumura is an artist who revisits the history of art and takes various starting points for projects, including interpretations of others’ works, creating art rooted in contemporary art issues such as the nature of authorship and collaboration. Each of his conceptual projects can be seen as extending chains of events that occur in the course of his intense research and engaging in a consistent questioning of identity, selfhood, and subjectivity.
This is a joint exhibition by Okumura and the 1940s-born artist Hisachika Takahashi, focusing on the latter. Takahashi moved to Italy in 1962 and worked as an assistant to Lucio Fontana, then from 1969 to 2008 was an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg in New York, and he produced art in collaboration with both artists, yet his practice was largely unknown to the art world. Okumura discovered materials on Takahashi’s 1967 solo show at Wide White Space, the legendary gallery in Antwerp, Belgium, and began investigating it out of curiosity. With cooperation from the gallerist in charge at the time, and after meeting Takahashi himself, Okumura began an initiative to annotate, act as a surrogate , and collaborate with Takahashi through exhibitions in Brussels, Tokyo, and Amsterdam.
This show at Le Forum explores one side of art history in the present progressive tense, through a body of works unearthed and newly created through interaction between the two artists.
For example, in a project from his early New York years Takahashi asked 22 artists including Jasper Johns and Gordon Matta-Clark to draw maps of the United States from memory alone. This can be appreciated both as a great collaboration-based work of art, and as a precious artifact document that resurrects the New York art scene and community of the 1970s. Okumura, in a video work where he gives an interview as if he were Takahashi, and other works in which he projects Takahashi’s memories into his own work, takes an approach that induces overlap and fluctuation between the two artists, generates new scenes from art history, and advances poetic interpretations of the artist and his work.
The fresh, engaging dialogue between the two artists suggests to the viewer that through artists’ practices, art is always open to new contexts and interpretations. It also conveys the potential for escape from the inevitable “I” as subject, and for unleashing a powerful force by intervening in history through the memories and images of others.