Satoshi Hirose “A Cosmology from Forest”

Satoshi Hirose elaborates on his longstanding experiences in foreign cultures, and creates works that visualize them with common materials that embrace sensations of floating and clarity. Employing various media such as installation, performance, sculpture, photography, and drawing, he continues to present a unique worldview within which reality and memory intersect.
Hirose picks up things dissolved within our daily life and recomposes them like poems: such as in the “Sky” series in which he took photographs of sky on his actual travels; the “Night” series whereby he traveled in the image of photographic clippings from printed matters; and the “Beans Cosmos” series in which he encloses various materials such as pasta, maps, beans and gold in acrylic cubes.　Conventional boundaries fluctuate by encountering different cultures and thing just like the experience of traveling. Hirose’s work embraces this fresh existence acquired by the deterritorialized imagination.
At the core of his practice lies the uncertainty and ambiguity of all things. By inviting viewers to experience the conversion of aesthetic standards and the fragility of reality that occurs when the familiar is repositioned in another context through sensory experiences, his work tells us that all things in the world are constantly changing.
In this exhibition, the first one in four years at Tomio Koyama Gallery, sculptures created from 1992 to 2017, drawings, and photographs will be presented as the medium composing the exhibition space itself. Mysterious and various worldviews, as well as the trajectory of the artist’s thinking, unfold as an installation as if it were a forest where various lives traverse one another.

Satoshi Hirose was born in 1963 in Tokyo. He graduated from Tama Art University in 1989 and two years later he received an Italian government scholarship and moved to Italy. In 1996-97, he stayed in Italy under POLA Art Foundation Grants Program. He then completed a degree at Milan’s Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 1997, and studied in New York under Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists provided by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2008-09. He is currently based in Milan and Tokyo.
His major solo exhibitions include "Lemon Project 03" (The Ginza Art Space, Tokyo, 1997), "Paradiso- Criterium 34" (Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki, Japan, 1998), “2001” (Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, 2000), and in more recent years "Heteronym" (Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli, 2015), and "Vis à Vis Flâneur - SATOSHI HIROSE" (Fondazione Molise Cultura, Campobasso, Italy, 2016).
He has presented work in numerous group exhibitions including "Neo Tokyo" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2001), and "Beppu Contemporary Art Festival 2012: Mixed Bathing World" (Beppu City, Oita, Japan, 2012), as well as a commission "Your Sky, My Sky: sky project for Arts Maebashi" Arts Maebashi, Gunma, Japan (2013). He has held five solo exhibitions at Tomio Koyama Gallery in 2000, 2005, 2008, 2009, ad 2013. Hirose also has worked on commissions in collaboration with companies.This July, he is creating an artwork in the new building of PeptiDream, a pharmaceutical company that pursues drug development.