Background
Takato Yamamoto was born in Akita Prefecture, Japan in 1960.
Takato Yamamoto was born in Akita Prefecture, Japan in 1960.
Takato graduated from the painting department of the Tokyo Zokei University.
Yamamoto began his working career as a commercial illustrator before becoming a visual artist and painter. This blurring of boundaries, between craft and style, has morphed into a unique aesthetic – which he calls ‘Heisei Estheticism’ – that makes his pictures more than merely commercial, more than an addendum to a fantasy novel. Rather his pictures manage to stand on their own as both a reflection of his own history as culture as well as that of B-movie cultural stereotypes that have had a global impact on all artforms over the last 50 years. His first exhibition was held in Tokyo, in 1998.
Yamamoto’s style is known as Ukiyo-e Pop, a bringing together of the Ukiyo style (translated as pictures of the floating world) – a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th – 20th centuries featuring landscapes, history, theatre and pleasure quarters – and Japan’s own riff on Pop art which borrows heavily from advertising, graphic design and animation.
Takato Yamamoto’s paintings are rich, detailed illustrations revolving around darkness, eroticism, bondage, vampires, metamorphosis, love and death. Yet despite these nightmarish themes, his work remains calm, serene, beautiful as if his subjects have been petrified, turned to stone, ageless in some weird fantasy horror novel.
Abyss of Worries
End of Crazy Love
J'ai Baisé Ta Bouche Jokanaan
Common Sense
Football Under the Moonlight
The Magus
A Dragon's Coffin III
Saint Sebastian
Secret Traces of Night
A Ghost in Ginza
A Carefree Metamorphosis
Innocence
For Secret Joy
Inspectionism Man
Erosion and Diffusion
Vampire
Confusing Entity
Ghost Diagram
The Emblem of Cthulhu
Maidenhead
Egg
Shimmering Sky
SHU-RA
A Dragon's Coffin I
Fermentation of a Hermaphrodite
Ecstasy of Linked Circles
Apparition
A Dragon's Coffin II
Confusion of a Peeping Tom
Lucy's Mutation
Grotesque
Chimera Tombstone
Sacred Circulation
His work is highly detailed and surreal, often juxtaposing images of death and sexuality and featuring copious amounts of Body Horror along the way. Colliding sex with death, Yamamoto offers the viewer a narcotic stillness at the intersection of lust and fear — the figurative eye of arousal’s storm.
Takato Yamamoto was the member of the Tokyo Illustrators Society and the International Ukiyo-e Society.
