Hiroshi Sugito

05.09. - 14.11.1998
Hiroshi Sugito (JAP)
Solo presentation at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

20.11. – 15.01.2000
Hiroshi Sugito (JAP)
„Paintings“
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin
 

02.06. – 07.07.2001
Hiroshi Sugito (JP)
"Paintings"
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

06.03. –17.04.04
Hiroshi Sugito (JP)
„the birdsong“
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

PRESS REALEASE

Within the past years the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugito has gained international recognition, particularly in the context of the Tokyo-Pop movement. However, his pictorial language diverges significantly from the ‘Super Flat’ aesthetic of his colleagues. Often theTokyo-Pop artists appropriate not only the childlike pictorial motifs of popular culture, such as manga comics or anime films, but also ist style by applying glaring colours, painting flat planes rather than volumes, and creating entirely smooth surfaces. Hiroshi Sugito’s subject matter however does not draw its inspiration solely from the stereotypes of mass culture. The initial impulse of his paintings seems to originate from memory, and his attention is turned inwards. In Sugito’s suggestive and bizarre pictorial inventions visual reality, dream, and childlike fantasies become one. Sugito also stands out in the field of Tokyo-Pop with regards to his painting technique. His atmospheric paintings are characterized by an open brush language and a fascinating enigmatic translucency.

In Sugito’s recent works tiny, stylized and sometimes vaguely discernible objects, such as mountaintops, waves, blossoms, and birds, as well as military airplanes, missiles, or fire, are hovering within vibrating fields of colour, which seem to expand into infinite space. The transparent depth of the luminous spaces is achieved through a sophisticated and time consuming technique of applying numerous layers of acrylic paint and dry pigment. Floating within those painterly horizons, the figurative elements seem uneasily lost in time and space, thus avoiding any obvious narrative or anecdotal meaning. Rather they read as poetic ciphers for memories, thoughts, and sensations. Similar to Magic Realism, Sugito frees the material objects from their conventional meaning and then uses them as open pictorial signs for his fantastic and sometimes disquieting imaginary worlds.

Recurring motifs in Sugito’s paintings are curtains, referring to a predominant metaphor of Western painting. A variation of the window motif can be found in the fragile grids of horizontal and vertical lines, which run across the entire picture plane, resembling blinds. Viewed from a distance they read as geometric abstractions. Sugito intelligently plays with the opposite compositional concerns of geometric abstraction and figuration, as well as with the tension between surface and spatial illusionism.

Due to their avoidance of linear perspective and their generous use of empty space, Sugito’s pictures are often compared to traditional Japanese painting, in particular to coloured woodcuts. During his artistic training Sugito studied ‘Nihonga’, a painting technique originating in the 19th century, which strives for combining conventions of traditional Japanese painting with pictorial strategies of Western Modern Art. Sugito’s oeuvre seems to push the aesthetic engagement of the ‘Nihonga’ style onto a different level. His paintings humorously and allusively comment on the history of the reciprocal influence of Western and Japanese pictorial traditions, and reveal the clichés, on which the perception of the Other is often based.

Hiroshi Sugito was born in 1970 in Nagoya, Japan, and studied at Aichi Prefectural University of Arts, Japan. He lives and works in Nagoya. Besides numerous group exhibitions in Japan (Museum of Contemporary Art), Europe (Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Ursula Blickle Foundation, Kraichtal, 8th Istanbul Biennial), and the USA (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art), he had successful solo exhibitions in Tokyo (Tomio Koyama Gallery, Contemporary Art Factory), London (London Projects), New York (Nicole Klagsbrun), Los Angeles (Mark Foxx), Milano (Galeria Gian Ferrari), and Sao Paulo (Galeria Camargo Vilaca).

We are delighted to announce Hiroshi Sugito’s third solo exhibition ‘the birdsong’ at Arndt & Partner.

12.06. – 29.07.2006
Hiroshi Sugito
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Zurich

PRESS RELEASE
The solo show of the Japanese painter Hiroshi Sugito at Arndt & Partner Zurich forms the second part of the exhibition which started last year with paintings from the past 10 years and continues now with recent works. The artist presents a series of large format paintings, a group of monotype prints and drawings on paper, as well as, for the first time, a sculptural piece.
Sugito creates dream-like scenarios in which a playful, child-like figuration, colour field painting and geometric-abstract formal elements fuse into a singular pictorial language. In "Connecting Man" - a polyptych that could be extended endlessly to both sides - hybrid creatures combining man, animal and architecture, drawn with minimal strokes hover within painterly backgrounds of monochrome atmospheric transparency. The works reveal Sugito's interest in western history of art, for example Paul Klee, which he seeks to combine with historical Japanese painting techniques particularly Nihon-ga, emerging in the 19th century, as well as with elements from popular culture. Recurring motifs are illusionistic, stage-like spaces serving as projection surfaces for Sugito's lyrical world view. They can be read as enigmatic metaphors for the unconscious.
Hiroshi Sugito, born in 1970 in Nagoya, Japan, studied at the Aichi Prefectural University of Arts in Aichi, Japan. He lives and works in Nagoya. He has taken part in important exhibitions in venues such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001), the Ursula Blickle Foundation, Kraichtal (2002), at the 8th Istanbul Biennale (2003), the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (2003) and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (2004). The series of works made in conjunction with Yoshitomo Nara was presented at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2004 and at K21 in Düsseldorf in 2005.

18.10. – 01.12.2005
Hiroshi Sugito
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Zurich

PRESS RELEASE
In anticipation of the large-scale solo presentation of Hiroshi Sugitos at Arndt & Partner Zurich scheduled for next spring, we show a selection of various individual works from the last ten years in the Galerie 2 at Arndt & Partner Zurich.
Hiroshi Sugito’s are among those who play with the tightrope walk between figuration and abstraction. Miniaturized objects, many of which are shown as outlined shadows only, hover in front of extensive sketches of picturesque spaces and encourage the viewer to interpret them as poetic traces of memories, phantastic tales, or dreams.Among the recurring motifs in his pictures there are curtains at the left and right hand side that transform the space of the painting into a theatre stage. This is what happens in the biggest and most important work in the exhibition „The Show“, 1996: here, countless tiny flying objects appear on the stage but they refuse to be deciphered in narrative terms.
Hiroshi Sugito (*1970) lives and works in Nagoya, Japan. Apart from the big solo exhibition „Over the Rainbow“(together with Yoshitomo Nara) at the Pinakothek in Munich and the K21 in Duesseldorf, recent presentations of his works include, for example, the solo exhibitions at Tomio Koyama, Tokyo, at Marc Foxx ,Los Angeles, at Fortes Vilaca, Sao Paulo, and at Nicole Klagsbrun, New York. Sugito took part in groupexhibitions, among others, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, at the Tokyo Opera City Museum, and at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art.