Jacob Hashimoto: In the Cosmic Fugue

In the Cosmic Fugue is Rhona Hoffman Gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of Jacob Hashimoto’s enormously imaginative and laboriously created work. The show will occupy the entire gallery with six new oil paintings and fourteen kite pieces, created from innumerable hand-painted and collaged rice paper and bamboo “kites,” Hashimoto’s signature medium. These visually striking, multi-dimensional works engross viewers through their organizational, geometric complexity, changing sight lines, and sheer beauty.

With In the Cosmic Fugue, the expansive and effervescent nature of Hashimoto’s work becomes more tightly organized and contained with bold visual graphics. His aesthetic inspiration stems from the space race era and 1960s California “Hard-edge” Abstraction. Unlike flat, High Modernist paintings; however, Hashimoto’s crisp lines fracture and transform as viewers move around his three-dimensional works.

A concern with space has always figured prominently in Hashimoto’s thinking, and In the Cosmic Fugue employs graphically minimal means to capture the cosmos’ vastness and infinite possibilities.

Jacob Hashimoto (b. 1973, Greeley, Colorado) received his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently lives and works in New York. Previous solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO) in Rome, Italy; Nevada Art Museum in Reno, Nevada; Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Italy; the Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden; Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, Italy; Rice University Art Gallery in Houston, Texas; and a site-specific installation at Schauwerk Sindelfingen, The Peter Schaufler Foundation in Sindelfingen, Germany.