Born in Tokyo in 1955, Shinro Ohtake is one of Japan’s leading contemporary artists. He first emerged with a breakout solo show in 1982 at Watari Gallery, which represented international artists including Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol, and in 1985 was the first Japanese artist to have a solo show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Through his noise band JUKE/19 (1978-82), Ohtake helped influence the direction of experimental music in Japan, particularly noticeable in the work of Yamataka EYE from the Boredoms, with whom Ohtake later collaborated in the music and art group Puzzle Punks. Ohtake’s works function as studies of materiality, form and process. They include drawings, collages and paintings as well as large-scale assemblage pieces that draw from the detritus of daily life, the urban environment and underground music culture.

Begun in 1977, Ohtake’s ongoing series of “Scrap Books” forms the core of his practice. Ohtake has made more than 64 unique books to date, ranging between 50 and 882 pages. Ohtake works on each book for several months to over a year, pasting found imagery and materials into fragmentary compositions on each page, and then adding hand-drawn and painted elements. The books take on sculptural yet organic properties.

Shinro Ohtake began working with Take Ninagawa in 2008, when he had a three-part solo exhibition at the gallery that ran from May to October. He has had recent mid-career surveys at Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art (2006) and the Fukuoka Art Museum (2007, toured to Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art). His work is in numerous public and private collections in Japan including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Benesse House, Naoshima. International collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2009 he was included in “I Believe: Japanese Contemporary Art” at the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, and completed a site-specific commission for Benesse Art Site Naoshima, the Naoshima Bath “I♥湯”, and in 2010 he participates in Gwangju Biennnale 2010.