ARCOlisboa 2026

In an era saturated with digital imagery, both Könst and Takasaki choose to return to the primal allure of painting. While their visual styles diverge, they converge on the essence of the medium: how color is layered, how lines define space, and how the artist breathes life into the canvas through the “touch of the hand.”

Könst’s work exhibits a highly refined pictorial grammar. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, he excels at transforming mundane objects from daily life—such as animals, flowers, or performers—into symbols with a sculptural quality. Könst’s “painterliness” is manifested in his masterful command of flatness and edge treatment. Utilizing low-saturation palettes and soft-edged geometric forms, he constructs a poetic, dreamlike sense of layering on the canvas. For Könst, painting is an experiment in composition; he conceals emotion within cool, deliberate layers, giving the surface a silky yet weighted materiality.

In stark contrast stands Shohei Takasaki. Based in Sydney, Takasaki’s creative process is a wrestling match between physicality and intuition. Heavily influenced by Neo-Expressionism, his painterliness stems from a “liberation of the body.” On the canvas, Takasaki blends oil paint, oil sticks, and charcoal, using bold, wild, and high-velocity lines to break the boundaries of figuration. His canvases are charged with primal energy, where human figures and still lifes are deconstructed and reassembled amidst exuberant blocks of color. This tense application of smearing and scratching embodies the artist’s passion for the “act of painting” itself, allowing the viewer to directly sense the rhythm and breath of the creative process.

Antone Könst (b. 1987, USA; based in New Haven) received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011 and MFA from Yale School of Art in 2014. introduces a visual language shaped by distilled forms and luminous colors. His paintings often depict figures or everyday objects with a disarming simplicity that belies their emotional complexity. Könst’s steady outlines and deliberate compositions create an atmosphere of sincerity, where humor and vulnerability coexist. His works can be found in the collection of X Museum, Beijing and Jorge M. Perez Collection, Miami.

Shohei Takasaki (b. 1979, Japan; based in Sydney) lived in both Japan and Portland before settling in Sydney. He brings a contrasting sense of urgency and kinetic movement. His paintings and drawings are driven by rapid, intuitive mark-making, capturing the immediacy of thought and the unpredictability of impulse. Energetic lines collide with vivid color, producing surfaces that appear simultaneously constructed and improvised. His work has found a place in the public collections of esteemed institutions, such as the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle and The Hoxton Hotel in Portland.