Kazuyuki Takezaki, a former gallerist and Japanese artist, passed away on Saturday, June 22, after a heart attack. He was 48.
Jeffrey Rosen, co-founder of Takezaki's Tokyo-based representative Misako & Rosen, confirmed the artist's death and said his gallery was working to set up an estate for Takezaki.
Takezaki died just weeks after the closure of his first major solo exhibition at 47 Canal Gallery in New York. He was based in Marugame, a beach city in Japan, and the show featured recent paintings of trees, mountains, vegetation, and other things he noticed in the area.
These paintings, with their forms that dissolve into abstraction, bear witness to a vanishing natural world, given that industrial intrusion by humans currently poses a serious threat to the Marugame area.
In an essay, Andrew Maerkle wrote accompanying the 47 Canal show: "Takezaki's windows onto this constantly shifting environment are also reflections on time, memory, and the porous overlaps between subject and object, communicating a profound yet fleeting sense of place."
Takezaki had staged very few exhibitions in the United States before this one at 47 Canal. He established a remarkable career in Japan with solo exhibitions at Misako & Rosen and the Kochi Museum of Art.
Rosen said in an email that Takezaki, or Jiro, as he was known to his friends, was an incredibly unassuming and generous person who managed, over two decades, to exert both as an artist and curator, an inestimable influence on the contemporary art world in Japan.
Furthermore, he claimed that though he was only recently recognized abroad, his imprint is evident to anyone familiar with contemporary Japanese artistic practice and its relationship to the global art world.
