EXHIBITIONS
Takuma Oue “rubbing-rhizome”
Dates: May 23 – Jun 28, 2026
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Maebashi
Opening reception: Saturday, May 23, 17:00 – 19:00
Taka Ishii Gallery Maebashi is pleased to present “rubbing-rhizome,” a solo exhibition of the work of Takuma Oue, on view from Saturday, May 23 through Sunday, June 28. Running concurrently with the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, the show will feature approximately nine new paintings and three new sculptures.
Oue’s practice is grounded in his own body, and above all in the sensations of the skin. Keenly attuned to bodily experience since early childhood, he treats each work as an extension of the skin and a means of testing and reasserting the boundaries of the self. Covering the body’s exterior and staying in contact with what lies beneath, while also being continually exposed to the outside world, the skin is a site where internal shifts and external stimuli intersect and interact. Viewing Oue’s paintings in this light, one is struck by his heavy use of red as an undercoat. The accumulated layers of paint hold the visible and the invisible in tension, with the skin’s layered depth transposed into the depth of the pictorial space. Blurred, translucent passages register as a faint sense of warmth or cold, and fine, sharply drawn lines as a stinging pain. As on the skin, where varied senses emerge and fade, the paintings take shape as a contest of color planes that never settle into definite form.
Standing on their own as artworks, these extensions of the skin claim space the way a body does, and Oue links them to ecological concepts such as “territory” and “threat display,” extending his personal, subjective experience into a wider frame. He draws parallels between the works, which preserve traces of movement guided by bodily sensation, and the marking by which animals stake out their territory through scent and other secretions. He also finds an analogue to threat displays, by which animals deter attack through a show of force, in the paintings’ visual elements: vivid clashes of color, thick tubular forms running vertically and horizontally as underlying scaffolding, and photographic collages of stones that deliberately break any sense of harmony. Aiming for sharp, immediate impact, Oue’s works prevent viewers from settling into the gallery for quiet contemplation, redirecting their attention to the territory of their own bodies. By externalizing his own personal space, Oue makes viewers conscious of the invisible perimeters they keep around their own bodies, charging the room with a primal sense of physical encroachment.
The sculptures, which Oue has continued to produce in dialogue with the paintings, are cast in plaster or cement from clay molds, with the traces of his contact preserved directly in their forms. The new sculptures in this exhibition were inspired by a bout of chilblains and the traditional Japanese remedy of rubbing in an ointment made from horse fat. Reversing the usual sequence, in which the active compounds of the oil sink through the skin to improve circulation, Oue makes tubular forms from which oil paint seeps out, in a metaphor for the horse-fat ointment drawing the blood vessels outward. The result is a new approach that ties back to the notion of “territory.” The tubular forms and the mediating oil also resonate with the paintings, evoking not only blood vessels but the vascular bundles and rhizomes of plants with visceral force, as though severed parts of the artist’s body had begun to multiply of their own accord.
The following solo exhibition of Takuma Oue will be held concurrently.
【Concurrent Exhibition】
“project N 102 Oue Takuma”
Dates: Apr 16 – Jun 24, 2026
Location: Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery 4F corridor
For more information
Takuma Oue was born in 2000 in Osaka Prefecture and currently lives and works in Ibaraki Prefecture. He graduated in 2023 with a BA (major in oil painting) and completed in 2025 a master’s degree (MFA) in the same field at Kyoto University of the Arts. He has participated in group exhibitions including “Mark Making”, Taka Ishii Gallery Maebashi, Gunma (2025); “Up_03”, MtK Contemporary Art, Kyoto (2025); “Hitashitoku”, GALLERY GARAGE, Kyoto (2024); “Jogyo Zammai”, A-LAB, Hyogo (2024) and “Rabbit, Hummingbird, and Homunculus: How to Make a New Horizon”, MEDIA SHOP, Kyoto (2023).
