Hisachika Takahashi, an artist who garnered a following in New York while serving as an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, has died at 85. His death was announced by Misako & Rosen, a Tokyo-based gallery that collaborated with Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery on a current show for the artist at the latter space.
Takahashi remained a relatively obscure figure for years, despite his close connections to artists well known in the West. He served as an assistant to Lucio Fontana before joining Rauschenberg’s studio and enlisted Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Gordon Matta-Clark, and others to help on a project called From Memory Draw a Map of the United States, for which he had his collaborators do just that. He even got Food, the famed artist-run restaurant in New York, to put sushi and sashimi on the menu—a gesture that was, at the time, unusual for an eatery in the city.
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In the past decade, however, Takahashi had emerged as an artist’s artist. Yuki Okumura, for example, recalled seeing Takahashi’s art in a warehouse and then went on to lead efforts to bring Takahashi’s work to the wider public, helping exhibit it at venues such as the WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels and the Fondazione Prada in Milan.
Born in 1940 in Tokyo, Takahashi sold a sculpture to the Japanese city of Yokosuka and used the funds to buy a trip by cargo boat to Italy. In Venice, he linked up with Fontana.
All the while, Takahashi was working on a group of pieces known as his “flower paintings,” which involved applying images of flowers to canvas painted in neon shades. When Takahashi exhibited these works in 1967 and Wide White Space in Antwerp, Fontana remarked that the show “secures his artistic future.”
Takahashi came to the US in 1969 and remained an assistant to Rauschenberg until the artist died in 2008. Takahashi’s duties included overseeing Rauschenberg’s SoHo studio and taking care of the artist’s animals and plants.
The artists’ work was in some ways conversant: much like Rauschenberg, Takahashi also produced pieces that likewise involved clipped material from mass media that he then collaged together.
“Studio assistant, art handler, conservator, gardener, cook, handy-man, in-house security guard, and consummate artist, Hisachika Takahashi was a force to be reckoned with and will be missed,” the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation wrote in a statement this week. “We extend our deepest sympathies to Agathe Gonnet, Hummingbird Takahashi, and Hisachika’s family and friends.”