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“Invisible Scenery”
Hiroyuki Kitano is a conceptual artist working primarily in photography. About his work he has said, “I always make my works using the medium of photography. I take photographs of anything that appeals to my interest, or which moves me deeply inside. After I develop and print them, however, I feel a strong sense of discrepancy between what I felt and the photographic images I see.” For his conceptual satisfaction he developed a complex work process. The current exhibition contains works from two different groups: “Invisible Scenery” and “Light Room/Light Surface”. The first he made as he worked as a researcher at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence in 2003 to 2004. About this he says “I was thinking about the essence of light as I made work everyday. I took a photograph of a starlit sky and drew the stars of the “Galaxy” one by one on top of the photograph. After returning to Japan, I made the series titled “Invisible Scenery”. In that series I made works on which I painted the flower of the cherry tree and snow on the photograph as a subject. Moreover, I made the work that is in the middle of actual scenery and the drawn image is produced by taking a picture and further printing the image to lose the material feeling of surfaces of the photograph on which the painting was done. While going back and forth by seeing and drawing between the ambiguous scenery of an image and a reality, I am pursuing the spectacle of scenery, which is not visible with a key of a visible thing. I would like to capture between the visible and invisible landscapes by taking photos and printing these painted landscapes again”. In 2014 to 2015, he worked in the Netherlands (Utrecht) and Germany (Kassel), and made the “Light Room” series based on his interest in the light as the essence of photography. He says “When I live in the Netherlands, I feel sensitive to the quality of light due to the unique weather of the Netherlands, and I often feel “light” in daily life. I was thinking about the light again because of the beauty and fun of the Holland light. I make a model that reflects and captures light and shoot it with natural light. (I call it “Light model”) Various textures are given to the surface, which is a model of the photographed light, just like the 3D mapping principle. What is visible on the surface is just a surface, not an essence, it's an easy way to say, but it's also an attempt to reconstruct the (personal) world's structure with expressions. The model of light and shadow is on the bottom and the surface is on it. The surface is the surface, but the essence lies below it.
Kitano has shown with DSCA for more than 20 years and this is his 3rd solo exhibition with the gallery. His works have been included in public exhibitions and collections in Tokyo, Kyoto, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Krakow, and Vienna.