Visual Arts Alum Motohiro Takeda '23 in Group Exhibition at MAMA Projects
Visual Arts alum Motohiro Takeda '23 is showing artwork as part of a group show at MAMA Projects in Midtown Manhattan. The show, Mutable Landscapes, is currently on view until October 9, 2025.
The exhibition aims to examine environmental changes at the hands of humans. "The immediacy of a landscape and what surrounds it is confounding," Bryan Martin writes in the press release, "getting to an awaited vista after a long journey leaves us marveling at the vast complexity before us that simultaneously can and cannot be comprehended—our senses firing on all cylinders. Just as these intimate moments with the environment shape us, so do we shape our environments.”
For this show, Takeda uses found materials and natural elements and blends them into new compositions. Using a traditional Japanese wood-burning technique, he embeds botanical elements into wood and concrete to create his sculptures—such as Hanaikada (Flower Boat) 1 and 2 (cherry blossoms and concrete, 2025)—sometimes placing them meticulously and other times in more arbitrary patterns that recall the look of fallen leaves.
In an artist statement for the Bronx Museum, Takeda said, "I work with raw materials from the natural and industrial worlds and combine and collaborate with these remnants in my studio. Through photography, sculpture, ceramics, and performance, I aim to distill and amplify the physicality of materials and draw out their interconnectedness, history, and inherent ephemerality through abstraction and transformation."
Motohiro Takeda (b. 1982) uses sculpture, ceramics, and photography to explore the impermanent nature of life. He investigates the transient core of time and memory and the space between man and nature in his work, and creates installations to contemplate on mortality.
Takeda is a 2024 AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum. He was awarded the Tierney Fellowship in 2008. He participated in the Artist in Residency program at Baxter St. CCNY in 2011 and at Woodstock Center for Photography in 2015. His work has been exhibited in various venues, including Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami), island gallery (New York), Arsenal Contemporary (New York), Storage Gallery (New York), Ibasho Gallery (Antwerp, Belgium), Unseen Photo Festival in Amsterdam, Photo London, Photo España, among others.
He received his BFA in photography from Parsons School of Design | The New School in 2008 and his MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2023. He was born in Hamamatsu, Japan, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.