Takahashi Hisachika Biography
Takahashi Hisachika (1940 - ) born in Tokyo in 1940, Hisachika Takahashi is an artist whose work specializes in printmaking, collage and assemblage. Takahashi immigrated to the United States in 1969 from Italy. In Milan he had already worked for several years as a studio assistant to Lucio Fontana. Still in Italy, Takahashi continued his pictorial practice; the resulting works, produced with an industrial roller of embossed rubber, were exhibited in his solo exhibition (1967) during the early years of Antwerp's legendary Wide White Space gallery. Perhaps the most famous painting in this series will remain the one that Fontana cut, resulting in a collaborative work by the two artists. Takahashi's interest in producing art collaboratively has been prevalent in his work ever since and is consistently evident in many of his projects. For "FROM MEMORY DRAW ME A MAP OF THE UNITED STATES," which he began in 1971-72, he asked several artists to draw a map of the United States from memory. Rauschenberg helped him make many contacts with the artists who would participate. These would have been Brice Marden, Gordon Matta-Clark, Susan Weil, Cy Twombly and Dorothea Rockburne and sixteen others. Takahashi thus became Rauschenberg's studio assistant, as well as the supervisor of his New York building and studio, 381 Lafayette, where Takahashi resided for over three decades.
