Shinzaburo Takeda Japanese, b. 1935

Though born in Seto, Japan, Shinzaburo Takeda is often referred to as the “most Mexican” of the Oaxacan-born artists. Trained at the University of Fine Arts in Tokyo (1957), he visited Mexico in 1963 and never left. In Mexico City, he studied mural paintings with Armando Carmona and Luis Nishizawa at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas “San Carlos.” He studied lithography with Francisco Vasquez at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Gráficas. From 1965 to 1977, Takeda worked as a painter and graphic artist for the Mexican Museo Nacional de las Culturas. In 1978, he moved to Oaxaca and began a new career as an art professor at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca. Many of Oaxaca’s most celebrated new artists, such as Alejandro Santiago, studied with Shinzaburo Takeda. Since 1980, Takeda has been the head of the Department of “Artes Plásticas” at the Oaxaca City University. In his years in Oaxaca, Takeda has been able to pursue his longtime interest in documenting the traditional cultures of Mexico; their ceremonies and festivals have become an inspiration to much of his work.

He observes and captures the customs and everyday practices of the indigenous peoples and then translates these into his own visual vocabulary of traditional Mexican imagery. The Nahual is one aspect of the indigenous cultures and belief systems that Takeda repeatedly returns to and conjures up in his prints. With its origins in the ancient Zapotec and Mixtec mythologies of Southern Mexico, the Nahual acts as a spirit guardian to each individual and reveals itself in the animal-human figures that permeate Takeda’s work. The duality of the Nahual is expressed through the totem-like forms he builds, where they can take on anything from a playful to an almost menacing nature. Takeda’s fascination with Mexican culture is forever present in his work and is absorbed and shared by any and all who consider the unique interpretations and imagery in his paintings and prints.

Takeda structures the surface of his paintings with a grid, a traditional system for an artist to work, but does not hide the grid when painting over it. He integrates it into each of his paintings, revealing the process the artist uses from the early stages of his work