We will have an opening reception on June 3 from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. If you are in Los Angeles, please come to the reception.

Exhibition Outline

Exhibition Name : Monochrome Colors

Artist : Hiro Sugiyama

Location : Speedy Gallery

2525 Michigan Ave.
B5B.
Santa Monica, CA, 90404

@speedygallery_la/

Artist Comments :.

Where is the line between figuration and abstraction?

In this series of black paintings, the artist silhouettes motifs from existing paintings and simplifies them to increase the level of abstraction. Furthermore, by eliminating all of the colors from the painting and painting it in black, the artist experiments to raise the level of abstraction to another level. If the painting exists in a corner of the memory, such as a Picasso or Van Gogh painting, even if the abstraction level is raised by two steps, the brain will start imagining the colors that should have existed in the original painting, and the brain will rotate at full speed to make the work with the increased abstraction level closer to the original painting. However, if you do not know the original work, the abstraction level of the painting will only go up.

At the end of the 1990s, I presented a piece painted in silhouette. I took the outline of the motif and painted the inside of it with black paint on a flat solid surface. By filling in with black paint, the information drawn on the inside disappears. In this series of black paintings, which he began making in 2020, he has taken a painting that had once been highly abstract and turned it back into a figurative painting. Rather than reapplying the original colors to the black painted areas, he reproduced the original paintings by creating extreme unevenness on the surface through the touch of the brush and the heaping up of the paint. The unevenness created by the black paint gave the painting an expression of light and shadow. The viewer responded to the expression of light and shadow and began to sense invisible colors. Then, abstraction was brought back to figuration. In this way, I enjoy creating paintings that move back and forth between figuration and abstraction.

Profile

1997

He was the first to start creating digital works in the pioneer days of the Internet. (Formed the artist unit “Enlightenment”)

Year 2000

His digital portraits (of Brad Pitt, Thom Yorke (Reddio Hett), and Karl Lagerfeld) were highly acclaimed by Jeffrey Deitch in New York, and a solo exhibition was arranged at “Deitch Project NY” (cancelled due to 911). (The exhibition was canceled due to 911.)

2001

Participated in the exhibition “Superflat” curated by Takashi Murakami at MOCA, LA.

He exhibited huge portraits of Ayrton Senna and Karen Carpenter. It subsequently toured the world in museums in London, the Bronx, Shanghai, and other cities.

2010s

Hiro Sugiyama began to work energetically again on his analog paintings.

Year 2020

He published his work [Drawing leads to another dimension], which contains 1600 works.

Year 2021

The “Black Paint Series,” which eliminates the colors of famous paintings and silhouettes the motifs, has been a hit in Asia. This will be the first time that Speedy Gallery will open its doors to the public in the United States.