Hiroshi Sugito

Hiroshi Sugito is painter of silence. With his canvases, he creates sparse decors conducive to chimeras and fantasies. Despite certain discernable motifs, an atmosphere of mystery pervades his paintings, offering up complex enigmas to be untangled by the spectator. To achieve this hazy transparency, Sugito alternates layers of acrylic and dry pigments, using a palette of delicate tones. He composes his painting using geometric forms as structuring elements, the principles of symmetry and skewed perspectives that further stylize his subjects, imbuing them with a particular theatricality.

Hiroshi Sugito was born in Nagoya in 1970 but lived in New York from the age of 3 to 14. He was taught by Yoshitomo Nara and is currently himself an associate professor in the fine arts department of Tokyo University. Associated with the Tokyo-Pop movement (alongside Murakami amongst others), he has since the 1990s enjoyed many exhibitions both in Japan and abroad. His major solo exhibitions include FOCUS (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, 2006), Prime and Foundation (Miyagi Museum of Modern Art, Miyagi, 2015) and Module or Lacuna (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 2017). His notable group exhibitions include Winter Garden (Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2009, which was subsequently shown in Cologne, Toronto and Mexico City), Garden of Painting (The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2010) and Logical Emotion (Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland, 2014, the Krakow Museum of Contemporary Art in Poland and the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg in Germany in 2015) amongst many others. His works feature in numerous international collections, most notably The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Saatchi Collection in London, the Goetz Collection in Munich and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art.