Artists | MAKI Gallery | MAKI

Born in Tokyo in 1974, Koichiro Takagi moved to the US after graduating from university in Japan and learned screen-printing at San Francisco’s Academy of Art College (now the Academy of Art University). He relocated to New York to start his career as a painter and returned to Tokyo in 2005, where he now lives and works. Using animals and anthropomorphic creatures as motifs, Takagi creates an eerie/peculiar Utopian world, playing with often conflicting concepts such as affinity and discomfort, anonymity and mysticism. Influenced by punk music and street art, he broadens the range of his creative output by using a wide range of techniques and materials such as painting, embroidery, collage, and stencil. Takagi’s works have recently been presented in various solo shows, including Is This My God?, Gallery TARGET (Tokyo, 2021); Infinite Light, MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2020); This is the secret everyone knows, Gallery TARGET (Tokyo, 2018); and KEMONO, Clear Edition Gallery (Tokyo, 2016); along with a number of group shows worldwide, notably in the US, France, and Singapore.