EXHIBITIONS
Camille Blatrix & Sanya Kantarovsky “Dressing”
Dates: Nov 6 – Dec 13, 2025
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Kyobashi
Opening reception: Thursday, Nov 6, 17:00 – 19:00
Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present “Dressing,” a two-person exhibition of works by Camille Blatrix and Sanya Kantarovsky, and the second formal collaboration of the two artists since their initial presentation together at Modern Art in 2021. This arrangement is composed of works that Blatrix and Kantarovsky made over the course of this year.
The finely detailed, wooden surfaces of Blatrix’s meticulously constructed marquetry and sculptural pieces—which include painting techniques, inlays, silver, and acrylic resin—further his experimentation in pairing traditional and contemporary technologies of making. The grain of Blatrix’s wood often serves as the departure point for a scrape or a carving, and as other pieces and scraps join to form a broader image, a geometry then becomes a suggestion—irregularities in their right place, caught within a frame.
Kantarovsky’s stoneware vessels, produced over the past several months, extend his recent engagement with the craft towards trials of scale and form, ash glazes, and oxides, at times directly invoking the 20th century British Studio Pottery movement and its radical exchange with the Japanese tradition.
The two artists, interested in the tension between interiority and exteriority, and the corporeal dimension of the handmade object, approach notions of surface-as-skin through the erotics of chemically and physically constructed (and altered) surfaces. The subject matter in the works of both artists, derived from motifs in their previous series, creates rhymes and reverberations through the haptic, formal dimensions of making and looking. Figures are lost in prayer, contorted in discomfort, trapped in their containers or locked in embrace with others. These motifs serve as both armatures and theatrical vehicles in the acts of looking and seeing.
Camille Blatrix was born in France in 1984. He currently lives and works in Paris. Blatrix graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2011). He studied at the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles (2010) and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Strasbourg (2006). His solo exhibitions include the Centre d’Art Contemporain du Synagogue de Delme (2021); Kunsthalle Basel (2020); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2018); and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2016). He has participated in group exhibitions including “Les Yeux dans les yeux”, Pinault Collection, Couvent des Jacobins, Rennes (2025); “Domestica Drama”, Halle Für Kunst Steiermark, Graz (2021); “Metamorphosis Overdrive”, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2020); “You: works from the Lafayette Anticipations collection”, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); and “L’Ennemi de mon ennemi”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018). Blatrix’s works are included in the collections of Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), Paris; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and The Perimeter, London.
Sanya Kantarovsky was born in Moscow, Russia in 1982 and currently lives and works in New York. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island and received his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kantarovsky has held solo exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum (2022), Kunsthalle Basel (2018), and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2017-2018). Recent group exhibitions include “Les Yeux dans les yeux”, Pinault Collection, Couvent des Jacobins, Rennes (2025); “Brave New World: 16 Painters for the 21st Century”, Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, the Netherlands (2023); “Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium”, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Baltic Triennial 13 “GIVE UP THE GHOST” (2018); “The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin”, the Jewish Museum, New York (2017); and “The Eccentrics”, the Sculpture Center, New York (2016). Kantarovsky’s works are included in many public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
