Akira Ikezoe’s Absurdist Paintings Find a New Audience in New York
A painting about milk, skeletons, and solar panels may sound like a joke. In Akira Ikezoe’s hands, it becomes something more exacting: a system of images that is funny, disquieting, and quietly ominous. The Japanese artist is now drawing unusual attention in New York through simultaneous inclusion in the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, making him one of only two artists to appear in both exhibitions, alongside Taína H. Cruz.
Born in a suburb of Kochi in 1979, Ikezoe moved to Tokyo at 18 and studied printmaking at Tama Art University before relocating to New York in 2010. He has shown steadily in the city since then, but he does not have a New York gallery. Instead, he is represented by Proyectos Ultravioleta in Guatemala City, a gallery with a reputation for building international careers from a relatively small base.
That trajectory now seems to be accelerating. Ikezoe was also included in the 2025 Sharjah Biennial, placing him in a broader circuit of major international exhibitions. In New York, his work stands out for the way it refuses to settle into a single reading. Milk can be paint, a source of nourishment, or part of a bizarre ritual. Animals can seem symbolic without becoming allegorical. Skeletons can appear matter-of-factly, as if they belong to the same orderly universe as cows and cans of paint.
One of the paintings in the Whitney Biennial, Robot Stories Around Solar Panels (2025), extends that logic. Machine figures harvest pearls from giant clamshells and echo Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, while other robotic workers nearby assemble solar paneling. The image has a comic surface, but it also points toward energy, labor, and the uneasy infrastructures that shape contemporary life.
Ikezoe has spoken about the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 in relation to his thinking, and that context helps clarify the tension in his work. The paintings do not illustrate catastrophe directly. Instead, they build worlds in which catastrophe feels embedded in the rules of the scene, folded into the same visual language as play and invention.
For now, that combination of whimsy and seriousness is giving Ikezoe a rare kind of visibility. His paintings do not ask to be decoded so much as inhabited, even when their logic remains stubbornly strange.
