Hino Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition entitled “Theophany” by Kiyoshi Nakagami from Saturday, February 23rd, 2019.

I have been thinking about what art is for a long time. The more one considers the conditions formed in excess of time and place, the more it loses. Now, I’m focusing on making people simply feel “something worth seeing” through my work and wish it would stay in their mind eternally. There could be so many ways to accomplish it though. For me now, in the form of painting, I believe I could realize it by the wonder of “existence” and “visuality” revealed through seeking light and space. —— Kiyoshi Nakagami

Kiyoshi Nakagami is a painter who was born in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan in 1949. When he began his career as an artist in the 1970s, he had a certain awareness of being a formalist and his work was clearly influenced by Formalism. He then continued to impose some kinds of restrictions in line with a Formalist approach while making his paintings during the 1980s and through the 1990s. However, although the forms within his works should be “stable”, they began to dissipate in the late 90s, when a glimpse of the expression of “light”, which became representative of Nakagami’s paintings afterwards, started to appear. It has been over 20 years since this style developed, and now this oeuvre has been explored throughout his career and the artist eventually accomplished an individualistic rendering of “painterly light”.

Nakagami believes that there is nothing more difficult than representing light (and inevitable dark) in painting as it is the element that brings space to a flat canvas. The light the artist strives for is not one we experience on a daily basis whether natural or artificial. It is a light that arises only in painting. Nakagami has managed to capture this instant, unprecedented emanation, which nobody has seen, using acrylic and gold mica on canvas. His paintings have intensity, perhaps yielded by his resolute, systematic ordering of process where no painterly gestures by the artist are discernable on the canvas, like yet unlike the contained forms that Nakagami devised and included in his earlier work. The fact is that, for his light paintings, he allows natural providence to prevail by depicting the forces of gravity, wind and heat. People can feel the same sense of reverent ephemerality or sublimity as if experiencing the light in nature from his painterly light.

Nakagami has been regularly exhibiting in Paris and New York over the years and his works are gradually gaining international acclaim. We hope you will enjoy his painterly sense of light, which you may find amazing.