Hisachika Takahashi, the Japanese artist who was best known for his collaboration with others, has died.
In the early 1960s Japanese-born Takahashi was in Milan working as an assistant to Lucio Fontana (as well as Robert Crippa) while embarking on his own career. As Takahashi painted a series of monochromes for a solo show at Wide White Space gallery in Antwerp, produced with industrial, embossed rubber roller, Fontana offered to slash one of the canvases with his trademark gesture, resulting in an ongoing collaboration between the pair. Thereon, Takahashi’s work frequently involved many other luminaries from within the artworld.
In 1969 Takahashi travelled to the United States and became Robert Rauschenberg’s assistant for several decades, and Rauschenberg introduced the artist to many of the participants in his work FROM MEMORY DRAW ME A MAP OF THE UNITED STATES, which Takahashi initiated in 1971, asking 22 artists including Brice Marden, Gordon Matta-Clark, Susan Weil, Cy Twombly, and Dorothea Rockburne to draw a map of the United States from memory. Takahashi would later become a chef at Matta-Clark, Caroline Gooden and Tina Giouard’s restaurant Food.
Further works included a series of untitled collages made from US lifestyle magazines, Polaroid photographs Takahashi took of his favourite hat, a series of found photographs erased with bleach, and Mirror Piece (1972), exhibited at 112 Greene St. (now known as White Columns), consisting of mirrors loaned to Takahashi by his artist friends.
After Rauschenberg’s death in 2008, Takahashi went on to have several solo exhibitions, featuring his now collage-based practice, including at the Exhibition Research Centre, Liverpool; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; and Misako and Rosen, Tokyo.
