Taka Ishii Gallery / タカ・イシイギャラリー

Sanya KANTAROVSKY

Sanya Kantarovsky’s artistic practice revolves around painting, oftentimes incorporating film, animation, sculpture, design, and curatorial projects. His paintings take aim at imagined human subjects, which are often entangled in a variety of discomforts, both psychological and physical. On these painted stages, dissonant frequencies of seduction and repulsion vie for the viewer’s attention. The artist interrogates how desire itself can be rendered, as it contorts the faces of pleading children, leering old men, rootless cosmopolitans, and the hungry masses. Drawing on the history of humanist painting and caricature, Kantarovsky’s subjects seem proud to have been rendered and simultaneously embarrassed to exist at this elevation, embodying a doubt that echoes the artist’s own fraught relationship with the project of painting. This indulgence in affect is marked with a wry self-reflexivity, acknowledging the futility of faithfully transmuting lived experience.

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, RI and received his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kantarovsky recently presented solo exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, USA (2022), Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland (2018), and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (2017-2018). Recent group exhibitions include Baltic Triennial 13 “GIVE UP THE GHOST” (2018), “The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin” at the Jewish Museum, New York (2017); “The Eccentrics”, at the Sculpture Center, New York (2016). Other important presentations include “Happy Soul” at LAXART in Los Angeles (2015); “You are Not an Evening” at Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen (2013); “What Were You Expecting, Mr. Milquetoast, a Plot?” at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe (2014). His monographs include Selected Works 2010–2024 from MIT Press in 2024, and No Joke co-published by Studio Voltaire and Koenig Books in 2016. Kantarovsky’s works belong to several prestigious museum 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, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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Yoshitomo NARA

Yoshitomo Nara was born in 1959 in Hirosaki, Aomori. He completed his Master degree at Aichi Prefectural University of Art and Music in 1987. Nara entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1988 and continued to produce and exhibit paintings and sculptures in Cologne after graduation. Since 2000, he has exhibited photographs, which he began shooting, driven by personal sensibility, in his teens, even prior to aspiring to become an artist. He has participated in numerous domestic and overseas exhibitions including “Bye Bye Kitty!!!: Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art,” Japan Society, New York (2011); “Rites de Passage,” Schunk Glaspaleis, Heerlen (2009); Non-sect Radical Contemporary Photography III,” Yokohama Museum of Art, Kanagawa (2004). His photographs, which capture scenes and lives, which might otherwise be overlooked, and various cultures, music, histories, and people, from a unique perspective, have increasingly received acclaim in recent years. His solo exhibitions of photographic works include “Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone―Take your time, it won’t be long now,” Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film, Tokyo (2018); “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” Daikanyama Hillside Plaza, Tokyo (2017). His photo-books include Yoshitomo Nara Photo Book 2003-2012 (Kodansha, 2012) and the good, the bad, the average… and unique (Little More, 2003). His photographic works are included in the collection of Neues Museum Nürnberg, Germany.

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Art Basel Miami Beach

Dates: Dec 5 – 8, 2019
Location: Miami Beach Convention Center
Stand: B15
Presenting works by: Tomoo Gokita, Nobuya Hoki, Sanya Kantarovsky, Kentaro Kawabata, Kazuhito Kawai, Zenzaburo Kojima, Sean Landers, William J. O’Brien