LONDON.- David Zwirner announces Suchness, an exhibition of new paintings by Japanese artist Daichi Takagi, on view in The Upper Room at the gallery’s London location. This is the first solo presentation of Takagi’s work in the United Kingdom.
Blurring the boundary between figuration and abstraction, Takagi’s recent work is introspective and reflective, focusing on phenomena observable in his everyday environment. Motifs such as trees, stones, rain, and the moon recur across compositions, alluding to the natural world but more powerfully to the fleeting nature of perception.
As Takagi describes, his practice begins with seeing and perceiving objects as pure experience. In his work, the distinction between subject and object, inside and outside, is not fully resolved, and the world emerges as a raw and immediate presence. The exhibition’s title, Suchness (真如), describes a state in which things simply are as they are. Rather than interpreting or controlling his subjects, Takagi attempts to give form to their presence, the space that arises around them, and the essence of experience. Underlying this approach is an affinity with modern Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida’s notion of ‘pure experience’, as well as Eastern philosophical ideas of non-duality in which the divisions between self and world are understood as fluid rather than fixed.
The paintings on view, all from 2026, range from intimately scaled canvases depicting sheets of rain or cloudy night skies to larger compositions focused on close-ups of exquisitely rendered objects from the natural world: stones, leaves, or the gnarls of an ancient tree trunk. In paintings such as Raindrops and Wanderer, Takagi uses delicate brushwork in a restrained palette to create contemplative scenes that hover uncannily at the edge of representation. Stone, Trunk, and Moonlight likewise push the threshold between stark reality and imagination. In these works, intricate forms emerge from velvety black backgrounds. Takagi’s organic images and landscapes are immediately recognisable and painstakingly realised, yet serve as portals to the romantic and the surreal.
Born in Gifu, Japan, Daichi Takagi (b. 1982) received his BFA and MFA from Tama Art University, Tokyo. In 2018 he received a Japanese Government Overseas Research Program Grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs and spent a year in the Netherlands. The artist lives and works in Kanagawa.
Recent solo exhibitions of Takagi’s work include The Moon and the Trees, Ramiken, New York (2026); Ramiken Piraeus, Greece (2025); God, Ramiken, New York (2024); Wanderer, Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam (2024); Inward, ECHO, Cologne (2023); Light, colour, outlines, KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo (2021); Intuition, Time & Style Amsterdam (2019); and aspect, KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo (2018).
In 2022, in conjunction with the solo exhibition Daichi Takagi: 2010–2022, KAYOKOYUKI published the artist’s first monograph.
Takagi’s work has been included in group exhibitions at venues worldwide including Elsewhen, Elsewhere, Art Intelligence Global, Hong Kong; POSTALES, Galerie Gato, Lima (2025); The Oak of Flagey, GEMS, New York; Gardener’s Ellipse, CAVES, Melbourne; On Ma, Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2024); Borrowed Landscape, Blum & Poe, Tokyo; NEW ORDER, ECHO, Cologne; twinsubordination, Ramiken, New York (2023); DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow, The National Art Center, Tokyo (2021); Footprints, Museum Haus Kasuya, Kanagawa (2016); and The Way of Painting, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (2014).
Takagi is represented by KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo and Ramiken, New York/Piraeus, Greece. The artist will have solo exhibitions at KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo and Ramiken, New York, in 2027.
