Lot 40

The anonymous women in this series were chosen randomly during Daisuke Takeya’s international travels over the years. The resources to create these paintings, such as photographs and other character information about the models, were limited. Takeya’s painting practice emphasizes the importance of processes—it is a continuous struggle of technique, and layering thick coarse paints sometimes conflicts with achieving satisfactorily meticulous details.

Untitled Study of an Anonymous Woman is part of a series that at once depicts the women and anonymizes them, representing a rhetorical dilemma for the artist: to depict the subjects without projecting his gaze while leaving visual evidence of his hand and process.