satoshi hirose
Artist
Satoshi Hirose (b.1963） is known for his in-depth projects in a wide range of media, including, installation, sculpture, painting, photography, performance and project. Through his practice, Hirose consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life. The artist himself has described his work as "a sort of physical and metaphysical argument composed of episodes or metaphors."
Born in Tokyo, Japan, Hirose originally trained as design and drawing at Tama Art University in Japan. After obtaining a degree, he completed his studies under Luciano Fabro, an Arte Povera artist at Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan with the supperto of a Pola Art Foundation’s Research Grant Programme and an Italian government scholarship. He moved to Italy in 1991, where he continues to live and work, and it was the confrontation with spiritual abundance, issues of modernization and social unrest in his new country of adoption that inspired his decision to become a visual artist.
Actively producing works since the 1990s when he commenced his artistic practice, he has participated in numerous exhibitions internationally, including those in museums and galleries across Japan, Asia, and Europe. In recent years he has also been involved in long-term projects that extend beyond existing art activities and consider interactions with society, such as Art project "Commons Farm" at Tanabe in Kinan region, Wakayama in Japan from started 2022 and his Sky Project (initiated in Maebashi in 2016, and anticipated to continue until 2035), in which he exchanges photographs of the sky with mothers and children of a single mother’s living support facility.
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), "The earth is blue like a lemon" (Arts Maebashi - Maebashi City Museume of Contemporary Art, Gunma, 2020) and "A journey of mandarin oranges" (Nagano Prefectural Art Museum、 Nagano, 2023-24) . He has held seven solo exhibitions at Tomio Koyama Gallery in 2000, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2020 and 2023.
He has presented work in numerous group exhibitions including “Neo Tokyo” (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2001), "Super future" (Luigi Pecci Contemporary Art Center, Prato, 2001) , "Officina Asia" Rete Emilia Romagna (Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, Galleria Comunale d'Arte, Cesena, Palazzo dell'Arengo, Rimini, 2004) and “Beppu Contemporary Art Festival 2012: Mixed Bathing World” (Beppu City, Oita, 2012), as well as a commission work “Your Sky, My Sky: sky project for Arts Maebashi” Arts Maebashi, Gunma, Japan (2013). In 2020, he He was created an artwork in the new building of PeptiDream, a pharmaceutical company that pursues drug development.
-A world where multiple different identities exist and meet
The concept of Hirose’s work, on a macro perspective, extends to encompass the entire earth, countries, seasons, and even to the universe. At the same time, Hirose discovers richness and diversity in the context of everyday Italian cuisine, while unearthing a common sense of happiness and meaning for life through the encounters and dialogues experienced over the course of his intercultural journeys. A major characteristic of Hirose’s work is to transfer such everydayness to an artistic level, while serving to present a strong influence on the viewer’s five senses.
While Hirose creates installations in which he covers entire floors with lemons or various spices to stimulate viewers’ sense of sight, smell, and taste, he is also known for his series of photographs that capture the sky, as well as his Blue Drawings that appear as if depicting an infinite proliferation of cells. In his Beans Cosmos series, various foodstuffs like beans and pasta, maps rolled up into balls, glass marbles, and flecks of gold are seen suspended in acrylic resin.
Hirose came to discover how richly complex worlds that often remain overlooked, in fact reside in the realms that exist between distinguished entities such as artificial and natural, day and night, as well as in the small things and those in the peripheries, thus serving to capture the profound contradictions and uncertainties that are indeed not apparent on the surface. Viewers are invited to experience the world of Hirose’s works from various viewpoints and angles while strolling through the exhibition space. The coexistence of heterogeneous objects, whose appearances change greatly through changing the perspective from which they are observed, indeed appears reminiscent of our society itself.