Yutaka Minegishi studied metal craft at Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry in Tokyo before moving to Germany in 1995 as a guest student of Fachhochschule, Pforzheim and then as a Masters student of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. He completed his Diploma in 2003 under the tutelage of Professor Otto Künzli and has since held solo exhibitions in Munich and Tokyo, as well as participating in many international group exhibitions.

Minegishi’s work was first shown in Australia as part of the exhibition Rings at Gallery Funaki in 2001. His work was included in Unexpected Pleasures at the NGV in Melbourne and the London Design Museum in 2012, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Museum Ceskeho Raje, Czech Republic and the Stichting Francoise van den Bosch, Amstelveen. Mainly Twisted is his first solo exhibition in Australia.

"We have worked alongside each other now for almost 20 years, and in our current studio for 11 years, sharing tools and stories. The work we make couldn't be more different. My complex constructions in contrast to perfectly resolved rings carved out of a single block of material. Tricky materials too, often carrying with them a remarkable history, whether in the form of an antique wooden ball sent as a gift from the other side of the world, or the tusk of a long extinct mammal, dragged from the Siberian ice. Tricky also as their names veil their true nature, "Pink Ivory" actually a wood, "Ivory" actually coming from a woolly mammoth. Ebony speaks for itself. Then their strange behaviour, wood and tusk that twists and folds and flows around the finger, fine materials happily behaving in unusual ways. The approach is direct, no drawings or models beforehand. Not talking and telling what to do, but listening carefully to find the curvaceous path which will allow the rings then to speak, to tell. It is only when the piece is fully finished that the decision is made whether it was the right path; wrong paths lead to the "Elephants Grave Yard", the name for the drawer of rejects. The pieces prove themselves when there is something familiar about them, but also something not beforehand thought through, a surprise. The finished ring, so contained, so right, begins the twisting path of the next story."

Helen Britton, August 2013