Herald St is delighted to announce Naotaka Hiro’s (b.1972, Osaka; lives and works in Los Angeles) second solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. Comprising new paintings and sculptures, the exhibition will occupy both of our London gallery spaces at Herald St in Bethnal Green and Museum St in Bloomsbury.
Naotaka Hiro’s work is concerned above all with the unknowability of the body and its physical and psychological depths. Among other influences, he marries the vanguard experiments in movement and matter of the historic Gutai group from his native Osaka with the West Coast performance scene he discovered upon moving to Los Angeles. Stemming from his background in filmmaking, Hiro’s process involves a constant back-and-forth between instinctive gestures and careful mark-making, which he likens to the dichotomies of actor/director, subconscious/conscious, filming/editing, and dream/awake, oscillating, as he describes, ‘between subjective immersion and objective analysis’.
Struggling with the notion that much of one’s body can only be perceived through a mediated form such as a camera or mirror, Hiro places himself as both the artist and subject, working intensely between the two states until their boundaries blur and he reaches ‘a complete void’. ‘Whether drawing or painting,’ Hiro recently observed, ‘my practice unfolds in two steps: the first is subjective, intuitive, and organic; the second is objective and analytical. These steps repeat, with two personas – instinctive and reflective – continually agreeing and conflicting throughout the work.’
Naotaka Hiro (b. 1972, Osaka, Japan) lives and works in Pasadena, California. Hiro received his BA from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997, and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, in 2000. His work resides in the collections of MoMA, New York; The Whitney Museum, New York; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; among many others. Hiro’s work has also been exhibited at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; LAXART, Los Angeles; Centre d’Art Contemporain, La Ferme du Buisson, France, among others. He is the recipient of grants and awards from the Art Matters Foundation and the Asian and Pacific Islander Artist Presenting Initiative. Hiro was recently included in Roppongi Crossing, a triennial exhibition of Japanese artists at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
