Shinro Ohtake

Mining diaries, travel experience, and dreams, Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake creates painterly, multi-layered collages. He also works extensively on artist’s books and has created album covers and functional art houses out of newspapers, magazines, discarded paper bits, and other ephmera. Though Ohtake first began experimenting with collaged scrapbooks as early as the mid-1970s (and they have remained central to his artistic practice), the artist is also recognized for his contributions to sound art, video, design, and music. In fact, Ohtake is a well-known noise-rock musician, and in 2012, when his work was featured at dOCUMENTA 13, the artist installed sound recordings along with neon signs, posters, clippings, and other found objects from all over the world.

In 2013, at the Venice Biennale, a selection of Ohtake’s scrapbooks were featured in the group exhibition “The Encyclopedia Palace.” Ohtake was born in Tokyo in 1955, and he graduated from Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 1980. His work is held in the permanent collections of numerous museums in Japan, and he has been the subject of solo shows throughout Japan as well as in Britain and the United States.