Hino Gallery is pleased to present “SAGAWA Koji Exhibition: ‘A Semi-Plane/Mass of Trees’ - Focus on 1990” from Monday, January 20th, 2025.

The title of the exhibition, “A Semi-Plane/Mass of Trees” refers to Sagawa's lifework series that has continued for more than 30 years since 1990, consisting of polygonal shapes such as triangles and pentagons, lines, and colored surfaces based on rhomboids. Sagawa recalls that his encounter with the “rhombus” as a motif was particularly groundbreaking: the first piece from “A Semi-Plane/Mass of Trees” was created in 1989, when Sagawa was 34 years old. In the early 1980s, when he was a graduate student at Tokyo University of the Arts, Sagawa was mainly producing minimalist color paintings, but as he searched for a new pictorial space, he gradually became deeply interested in the way familiar landscapes are seen. This probably relates to the environment in which Sagawa spent most of his time during that period.

In 1985, he left the graduate school of Tokyo University of the Arts and became a lecturer at Kyoto Seika University, and since then, he has been based in Kansai, where he set up his studio in the countryside surrounded by the rolling mountains of Shiga Prefecture. One early evening, when taking a walk around the grounds of his studio surrounded by this rich natural environment, a voluminous tree suddenly appeared to Sagawa as a rhombus shape due to the way it was backlit. He has also stated that in early spring, when he saw rice fields filled with water before planting, (and that had until shortly before been simply an expanse of plowed brown dirt) they reflected the sky like a mirrored surface, while maintaining the sense of perspective, and the rhombus form appeared. These experiences convinced him that he could weave multiple layers of illusion into the rhombus form, which, although visually flat, envelope the landscape of trees and sky with a deep sense of volume.

The form of the rhombus in itself is not particularly important. What is important is that the paintings respond to and work in relation to the viewer's body while maintaining their material presence and flatness. Sagawa says that he wants to create paintings that give a sense of unshakable stability as a whole, despite the ambiguous overlap of various elements such as breadth, volume and depth, and the interplay of multiple perspectives in the simple form of a rhombus. When you see Sagawa's paintings, in which layers of paint, carefully applied over time, seem to ooze from the depths of the support, you feel as if a natural landscape is emerging, as if reliving the artist's own perceptions. Sagawa describes his own work as “closer to landscape than to figurative landscape painting,” but it is not mere formalism, and because it is abstract, it has the power to awaken an original image of landscape that lies dormant in each of the viewers’ minds.

This exhibition, Sagawa's first at Hino Gallery in three years, will focus on oil paintings from 1990, the starting point of his encounter with the rhombus, which marked an important turning point in his career as an artist.

We hope you will come to see the exhibition and enjoy his works.