NAOTAKA HIRO
Born in Osaka, Japan in 1972, Hiro graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1997 and completed his M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts in 2000. After working as an assistant for Takashi Murakami and Paul McCarthy for a period, he began his artistic career based in Los Angeles. His works span various forms of expression, including video, sculpture, and painting, using physicality particularly the artist’s own body as a starting point. In 2022, Hiro held a solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum (US) which is famous for its architecture designed by Shigeru Ban. Major group shows he has participated in include Prague Biennial 1 (National Gallery Prague, Czech Republic) in 2003, Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College (US) and La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art (France) in 2015, Nevada Museum of Art in 2021, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2022, etc. His works are in the collections of MoMA (NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), the Hammer Museum (LA), and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
-
Title: untitled (Speaks)
Year: 2023
Medium: acrylic, pencil, grease pencil on paper
Dimensions: 106.7 x 81.3 cm (42 x 32 in.)
-
untitled (Speaks)
-
Year: 2023Hiro takes his own body as the starting point of his works and his own body undeniably identifies his existence. However, he cannot directly see his own back with his own eyes. In Hiro’s works, he expresses a body that should exist there but cannot be recognized. In drawings such as this work, they are created by laying his own body directly on paper. In similar works, the starting point of the drawing corresponds to a part of his own body (nipple, genitals, etc.). The meaning of using his own works as the starting point precisely lies in the direct correlation between the work and Hiro’s body. In this work, like others, the picture plane is created by a gradual symmetric form. Even though there are differences in human bodies, they are still generally symmetrical in shape. This work may seem abstract at first glance, but it is an extremely figurative image of Naotaka Hiro’s body. He imagines his body parts that are invisible to his eyes and even if they are visible, he shapes the work through sensibility without trusting his sense of sight. In the process of human development, people gradually acquire a body image from childhood and understand the approximate structure of their own body without seeing it. In other words, the strong interests people pay in the bodies of others, our bodies, are the closest in our daily lives. The strong interest shown here is akin to the fear of forgetting about one’s own body as the most certain existence, or the fact that there are unknown territories exist inside.
Medium: acrylic, pencil, grease pencil on paper
Dimensions: 106.7 x 81.3 cm (42 x 32 in.)
Acquired from Misako & Rosen, 2023