Gozo Yoshimasu

Born in Tokyo in 1939, Gozo Yoshimasu has been active since the 1960s as an avant-garde poet and multimedia artist. Often incorporating diverse languages and literary references, Yoshimasu’s poems seek to recover and reinvent the shared roots between poetry and performance. He has also created his own video practice, gozoCiné, combining video with spontaneous poetic composition and readings.
Yoshimasu’s work was recently featured in the 2021 Manchester International Festival in “Poet Slash Artist,” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lemn Sissay. In 2016, Yoshimasu was the subject of a major retrospective solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, “The Voice Between: The Art and Poetry of Yoshimasu Gozo.” In 2017 and 2018, his solo show “HATENOUTAGOE” traveled from the Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi, to the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, Naha, and the Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo.
Group exhibitions include the 21st Bienal de São Paulo (1991); the presentation “Yoshimasu Gozo: Fire Embroidery—Beyond Ishikari Sheets” at Sapporo International Art Festival (2017); “Sharjapan,” Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2018); Reborn-Art Festival 2019, Ayukawa, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan (2019); and MOT Annual, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2019). Publications include Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Selected Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu: A Book in and on Translation, ed. Forrest Gander (New York: New Directions, 2016).

Take Ninagawa

Established in 2008, Take Ninagawa is dedicated to promoting emerging and historically established Japanese artists in a cross-generational, international framework. Represented artists build upon precedents in Japanese post-war experimental art while developing unique approaches that address contemporary concerns, while international artists in the gallery program are invited to respond to the unique context for contemporary art and culture in Japan. Each exhibition at the gallery is conceived on a project basis, with artists encouraged to develop ideas across series of exhibitions.