“Cumulus”
Hiroshi Sato
October 7th – November 2nd, 2024
Reception: Saturday, October 12th, 1-4
Marrow Gallery proudly presents Cumulus, San Francisco-based painter Hiroshi Sato’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring all new work, Sato’s latest collection showcases a cumulative fusion of the innovative approaches to form and perspective he has honed throughout the last ten years. Sato’s paintings unveil themselves like folded pieces of origami, with interlacing diagonals of negative space drawing attention to the layers of formal complexity around them. From nuanced oil washes to unresolved grays and shifting stills, Sato’s scenes deftly evade the scrutinizing eye while still leaving careful clues of the artist’s hand. Sato himself has constructed and deconstructed his approach to contemporary oil painting nearly ad infinitum, working back and forth between academic tradition and modern uncertainty until settling upon his final fold, which while refreshingly original, also pays homage to the procedural folds and art historical figures that came before it.
Sato wishes to assert his work as a reminder in our contemporary art world that it is not only how, but what is painted that is also a radical artistic choice in itself. The core of Sato’s work is of the everyday person—posed sitting at their desk, gazing out of a window, or waiting outside of a shop, and often in moments of solitude despite some presence of others. It is in these scenes of unremarkable mundanity in which we may have a moment of respite to recollect ourselves amongst the demanding distractions of the modern world and simply observe our perceptions, which as Sato has adroitly captured, may be far more inventive than we realize.
Sato’s figures are intentionally nonspecific, often blurring the lines of gender, race, and class to allow the viewer to ascribe their unconscious biases onto their personhood and to notice this perceptual process in themselves. His use of abstraction works like a double edged sword, allowing us to both resonate with the eerily familiar scenes and also find them mystifying to place. As soon as one begins to decode Sato’s scenes of the quotidian, his formal experimentations refract our gaze yet again, resisting resolution and leaving us, like his figures, perpetually transfixed.
Sato’s newest body of work Cumulus is also keenly attuned to the atmosphere of the social and political landscape in 2024. While the promises of modern technology may have allowed for more connectivity than ever before, the aftershocks of a pandemic and growing divides in politics and class have demonstrated its superficiality. Sato’s figures wander the landscapes of modern confusion, peering across seemingly irreconcilable horizons in longing for a sense of genuine sincerity and community. Like the San Francisco clouds rolling in on a bright day, Sato’s vibrantly colored landscapes are overcast with a mood of deep existential contemplation—a state which permeates into each viewer that stumbles into the folds of his captivating work.
Hiroshi Sato was born in Japan in 1987. He spent his childhood in Tanzania but returned to Japan for secondary school. His work has been featured in Visual Art Source and Juxtapoz Magazine. He was most recently Artist in Residence at the Cheekwood in Nashville, TN. His work is in public collections including Cheekwood and Ionis Pharmaceuticals. He has shown extensively across the US and UK.
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