Shigeo Otake: A Dim Cozy Room

A Dim Cozy Room illuminates the four-decade career of the Japanese artist and research scientist Shigeo Otake, and is the first major monograph dedicated the evolution of his unique and eerie vision.

Otake creates fantastical creatures – part human, part fungi – who populate his artistic landscape in which ‘the ordinary and the otherworldly coexist.’ He had already been painting strange, near-mythical characters when a casual encounter with a large wild mushroom not only sparked his lifelong devotion to mycology but also seeded in his mind an unsettling picture of the end of civilisation.He says it was the parasitic cordyceps, ‘forms so bizarre that they surpassed the furthest reaches of my imagination and thoroughly captivated me’ that prompted him to imagine a future in which these mushrooms melded with human bodies and minds, creating a brand new species with a hybrid consciousness. His giddy yet mournful paintings feature people whose heads are sprouting tentacular fungi or capped with mushrooms where hair would otherwise be. He creates scenes of both parades and funerals for these weird creatures, and flowerpots from which the new generations grow tall.

Not dissimilar the Italian and Spanish Medieval and Renaissance religious art he studied as a young man, Otake’s paintings are rendered with a precise hand and in lively compositions and muted jewel-like palettes that infuse his works with the aura of the sacred. Inspired also by the mad whimsy of Hieronymus Bosch and the carnivalesque landscapes Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Otake’s playful grotesqueries seize the viewer’s attention in order to elicit a moment’s contemplation, perhaps to ponder our fate and the fate of natural world.

A Dim Cozy Room features 64 colour plates, 38 colour photographs from Otake’s field research and an essay by the artist.

American Art Catalogues, 184pp, 27cm x 23cm, illustrated hardcover, 2024