Takato Yamamoto

Hermaphrodite's Body

Takato Yamamoto

I recently discovered the artist Takato Yamamoto, and I was struck by his style which resembles Klimt very closely, except dark and futuristic. For example, this painting follows the same layout as The Kiss:

The Kiss

Gustav Klimt

Figures are centered, and all you can see of their bodies is their faces. Both have great attention to detail, and simplistic backgrounds.

Takato Yamamoto has a lot of really great pieces you can find on google, but good luck trying to find something hi-res because it's not going to happen. His stuff is very magical (grotesque), very mythological (references to Tarot), and incredibly Japanese (lots of schoolgirls). The style is clean, so all his paintings feel iconic, probably because he also does illustrations and posters instead of straight paintings. Despite all the references to the past, his work seems very futuristic and post-apocalyptic, but maybe that's just the facial expression. Although the gruesome situations are evocative, the figures almost all have the same blank face in every piece, though the few that stand out have intense expressions of pain.