Before last year, Japanese painter Takako Yamaguchi and her work were relatively obscured to the larger portion of the global art market, with her pieces often fetching low five-figure prices in smaller auction houses.
However, in 2023 alone, the 72-year-old LA-based visual artist has broken through the $1 million mark with one of her recently auctioned paintings.
Several of her pieces have even started to appear in high-profile auctions in recent years and more of her work are slated for the same fate.
Big Sales Among Takako Yamaguchi's Oeuvre
In the coming week, several of Yamaguchi's art will grace the block of evening sales at Christie's and Sotheby's, alongside pieces by fellow on-the-rise artists. For now, though, some of the Japanese artist's paintings are on view in the ongoing Whitney Biennial.
Occupying the lot at Sotheby's is an untitled oil and metal-leaf piece made in 1998, which is estimated to sell between $400,000 to $600,000. It depicts a floaty, dream-like scene that features sea anemones, coral reefs, and pink lotus flowers. Also, it has a third-party guarantee.
On the other hand, the Yamaguchi piece that will grace Christie's lot is an oil and bronze-leaf painting she dubbed "Sally and Miu-Miu" (1994). It shows a woman smoking a cigarette while sitting beside her black cat, evoking a similar "fantastical" feel through her use of geometrical shapes.
Yamaguchi's rise is anything but abrupt though, with her rise slowly increasing in intensity in the past few years ahead of the Whitney Biennial.
For one, she appeared in a Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition in LA in 2019 devoted to the aesthetic movement of "Pattern & Decoration," which popularly channeled techniques from craft-making into painting in the 1970s and was seen as a feminist gesture at the time.
What followed was a critically acclaimed show at New York's Ortuzar Projects show in 2023, among other exhibitions.
The most popular of her works are those in her "Smoking Women" series, one of which sold for $991,000 in an auction app called Fair Warning, way past its $500,000 to $700,000 estimate.
Conversely, her most expensive work sold to date was only sold last March: her "Catherine and Midnight" (1994) piece which initially had an estimated price of $500,000 to $750,000 before fetching over $1.11 million (with fees).
