Shinro Ohtake
Shinro Ohtake (1955, Tokyo) is a highly influential Japanese contemporary artist, best known for his dense, layered collage-based works, paintings, sculptures, and large-scale installations.
Shinro Ohtake’s work is often described as accumulative – he layers found materials such as magazines, photos, handwritten notes, vinyl records, packaging, and paint into thick, almost archaeological surfaces.
His art deals with memory, time, noise, decay, and information overload. Many works feel like visual diaries or archives, blurring personal history with mass culture. He embraces chaos and excess, resisting clean minimalism.
Shinro Ohtake began exhibiting in the late 1970s and has since shown work internationally including documenta 13 (Germany) and the 55th Venice Biennale (Italy). His practice spans nearly five decades and includes painting, installation, photography, sound, and collage.
The “Retina” series is named after the retina, the light-sensitive membrane at the back of the human eye that processes vision. In these works, Ohtake greatly enlarges discarded Polaroid test films that bear traces of light and time, then coats them in transparent urethane resin, creating surfaces where photographic imagery and material depth converge. The resin-coated surfaces evoke memory, time, and perception, as the images appear to sit between abstraction and photographic remnants.
