Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self accompanies the 2023 survey exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani, of more than eighty paintings by the late Japanese artist on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his birth. With works from the Ishida Estate, notable private collections, and the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka City, Japan, Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self represents the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to have been staged outside Japan, and his first ever in New York.
Over the course of just ten years, Ishida produced a striking body of work centered on the theme of human alienation. He emerged as an artist during Japan’s “lost decade,” a recession that lasted through the 1990s, and his paintings capture the feelings of hopelessness, claustrophobia, and disconnection that characterized Japanese society during this time of rapid technological advancement. Before his untimely death in 2005, Ishida conjured allegories of the challenges to national life in paintings and graphic works charged with a Kafkaesque absurdity.
