Nobuya Hitsuda "○△□"

Oct 28 - Dec 3

Artist: Nobuya Hitsuda

This exhibition will showcase paintings and drawings created since the 1990s, along with newly crafted pieces that use work boards that were used and passed on from the Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts to Tokyo University of the Arts laboratory rooms.

Nobuya Hitsuda reconstructs familiar landscapes- mountains, ponds, vacant parking lots, brick walls, wire fences, crushed cans, and flowers- employing geometric forms like oblique and straight lines, circles, triangles, and rectangles, complemented by vibrant and deep colors. This unique approach compresses distant and close-up views, forming a distinctive spatial experience. Hitsuda's motifs are often everyday landscapes, yet the composition offers a mysteriously intriguing realm where past and present intersect and flow continuously.

Born in 1941 in Ota Ward, Tokyo, Hitsuda spent his formative years in post-war Tokyo, where the ground of the streets was still exposed. Often climbing up the banks of the Tama River, he gazed at the views of the river's shifting attitude, shaped by typhoons and floods, and Tokyo's changing landscape during the economic boom(*1) which remains to be the recurring scenery of Hitsuda Nobuya’s paintings. His keen observations of various artworks across eras, along with exposure to movies, theater, and architecture, became the foundation for constructing rich sceneries through the accumulation of visual experiences in the city.

The exhibition's title, "○△□" might bring to mind zenga paintings by Sengai. However, the emphasis here seems to lean more toward the direct morphological meaning of ○△□ than its religious or symbolic connotations. The circular imagery that is frequented in the exhibition portrays landscapes in flux, such as ponds, puddles, or vacant parking lots undergoing construction. Compositions featuring geometric forms lack a vanishing point, and the interplay of oblique and straight lines introduces fluctuations in the image. One’s perspective remains unfixed, and one’s gaze meanders diagonally, vertically, and horizontally from the center, causing the reflected landscape itself to oscillate.

A landscape emerges by gathering fragments of scenery from here and there, "changing its form like a creature while calmly being there"(*2) in both the past and present. It is not only Nobuya Hitsuda’s Scenes Passed by but also, perhaps, the idea that it is one’s own scenes passing by.

*1: Konishi Nobuyuki, "Nobuya Hitsuda: Leading Straight to the Landscape" (‘In the Little Playground, Hitsuda Nobuya and his surrounding students,’ Aichi Triennale Executive Committee, 2009)
*2: Nobuya Hitsuda, “Scenes Passed by" ('Nobuya Hitsuda: Scenes Passed by,' Tokyo University of the Arts Publishing, 2008)

Schedule

October 8 to December 3, 2023

Hours
12:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Fee

Free

Venue

KayokoYuki

2-14-2 Komagome, Toshima-ku, Tokyo 173-0003

Access

2 minute walk from the East exit of Komagome Station on the JR Yamanote line, 2 minute walk from exit 4 at Komagome Station on the Namboku line.