The media showed creepy paintings by an iconic Japanese artist that predicted people’s loneliness

The media showed creepy paintings by the cult Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida

Surrealist artist Tetsuya Ishida, who died in 2005 at the age of 31, was not a loner, according to those who knew him, but he stood apart from his contemporaries and the most famous artistic movements of the era, revealing in his work a deep, dark hidden the essence of anxiety and fear permeating the country’s youth, writes CNN.

His eerie paintings of office workers and schoolchildren exude loneliness, absurdity and despair, offering a glimpse into what it was like to be part of Japan’s “lost generation” – young people who were stranded by the country’s economic and social problems in the 1990s. x and 1990s. early 2000s.

In Ishida’s 1996 work, Refueling Food, a series of expressionless robot workers in aprons and hats feed anonymous men in suits using devices that resemble drills or gas pumps.

In “Gripe,” he depicts a hunched figure in a tattered suit, his body appearing to transform into an industrial forklift.

The children he portrayed were often similarly imprisoned. In the painting “The Prisoner” a giant figure lies pinned – a child’s version of Gulliver; instead of ropes, his body is held in place by the structure of the school building. Almost identical children in sportswear stand around him in a nearby playground, although none of them seem to interact with him or each other.

“I think the most powerful thing about his work is that we find ourselves in these paintings,” said Nick Simunovich, manager of the Gagosian Gallery, which put on an exhibition of his work.