Workers are expendable in the alienated world depicted by Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida in the late artist’s paintings at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. Coming into adulthood in the Japan’s economic depression in the ‘90s, known as the country’s ‘Lost Decade,’ Ishida catalogued the dehumanizing effect of corporate culture in images that depict workers taking in food from nozzles as if in a gas station or emerging from train doors in the form of boxes with heads, ready for delivery and consumption. Here, in ‘Exercise Equipment,’ a worried looking individual with Ishida’s features runs not for the health benefits, but to keep ahead of the workers poised to yank him from the treadmill. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 21st).
