Yutaro Inagaki (b.1998) is a Japanese artist currently based in London. The origins of his practice lie in the urban exploration he immersed himself in as a teenager in Tokyo. Crawling through the city’s underground spaces and hidden infrastructures with his own body, he came to perceive the city not as a cold, inert vessel, but as a vast living organism in a constant state of transformation. This embodied sense that the city and the body exist in continuity has remained the foundation of his practice across painting, sculpture, and mural works.

Inagaki constructs living organisms using black urban readymades and industrial materials as new fur, skin, and muscle. Through painting and sculpture, he gives form to their textures and relationships, creating hybrid bodies in which the city and the body continuously infiltrate one another.

The human and animal figures that appear in his works emerge as anonymous beings, stripped of any identifying characteristics. Adapting to the urban environment while at times encroaching upon it, they embody new forms of life in which the boundaries between human and environment, organism and artifact, become increasingly indistinct.

Taking as its point of departure the ways in which individuals are anonymized within the contemporary metropolis and transformed through their reciprocal entanglement with the environment, Inagaki’s practice seeks to reconsider the city as a single ecosystem.