Aya Takano | Items for sale, auction results and history

Aya Takano is a prominent Japanese artist known for her unique blend of Surrealism, science fiction and Japanese pop culture. She is associated with the ‘superflat’ movement, a postmodern art style founded by Takashi Murakami, which emphasises two-dimensional imagery influenced by manga, anime, and Pop art. Aya Takano’s work offers a glimpse into the artist’s private world of fantasy that travels through space and time.

Born in 1976 in Saitama, Japan, Takano graduated from Tama Art University in Tokyo in 2000 and subsequently worked as an assistant to Takashi Murakami. With Murakami as her first mentor, Takano is undoubtedly influenced by the leading Japanese artist in her exploration of the two-dimensionality of figuration. In fact, her sources of inspiration are wide-ranging, from erotic stamps dating from the Edo period to Impressionism, Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt.

Juxtaposition is central to Takano’s aesthetic approach; a jarring mismatch of atmospheric realms is often seen in her work. She explores the liminal spaces between countryside and city, fantasy and reality, nature and culture, child and adult, leisure and labour.

At the same time, Takano exhibits a strong desire to reinvent and reclaim the highly gendered otaku culture (geek culture) through a feminine perspective. Drawing from the concepts of escapism and fantasy in shojo manga (girls comics) of the post-war era of the 1970s, Takano’s images establish a kind of psychological sanctuary for her audience to surpass the conventions of social constraints by employing vaguely familiar but distant settings, all of which are transmuted into her delicately painted and vividly coloured canvases.

Takano’s work has been exhibited internationally in Paris, Tokyo, New York and Hong Kong. In 2011 Christie’s sold a monumental canvas by Takano entitled You Want to Get Out of Here, Don’t You? (2007) for HK$3,380,000, setting a world auction record for the artist.

Aya Takano’s rich and complex visual language is a successful union of her imaginative genius and mastery in painting. Takano anchors the quality of her work by the breadth and depth of her pictorial world and the capacity of an imagination that is unmistakably revelatory of the perceived complexities of our everyday world.