PRESS RELEASE

2016.07.19

Hirofumi Isoya: Raising a Gap
Dates: 1st - 30th August 2016
Venue: Itamuro Onsen Daikokuya
Address: 856 Itamuro Nasushiobara
Tochigi 325-0111, Japan
Website: www.itamuro-daikokuya.com
Artist talk: 20 - 21pm, 18th August
Cooperation: Aoyama ¦ Meguro
Raising a Gap (2005-2012）
C-print、Painted frame

Itamuro Onsen Daikokuya is pleased to hold Raising a Gap, a solo exhibition by artist Hirofumi Isoya fromMonday, August 1, to Tuesday, August 30, 2016. Making his first with us, this exhibition presents 16
photographic pieces by the artist, including 4 new works.
A recurring motif of Isoya s photographic work is a variety of physical and mechanical events, such as an
entrance door drawing an arc over accumulated snow, a strawberry fruit raised while being enclosed in an
acrylic capsule, and sunlight coming through a plastic cup lying on the ground, creating unexpecteddiffuse reflections.
Calling those situations of cause and effects and actions and counteractions scenery in search ofequilibrium, Isoya looks into how fragile and ephemeral the state of things in such a process is, and how
the world enduringly maintains itself with a fine balance of interrelations. In each of his ongoing
long-term series of small-sized photographs, such sensibility of the artist is crystallized with a distinct
atmosphere.
The series includes a number of monochrome, sepia-toned photographs, whose original colors have been
intentionally reduced. Another manipulation is that one color or two that used to characterize each of theoriginal photograph is/are now painted over part(s) of the frame that supports it. In other words, Isoya
purposely separates colors from shapes in a photograph and takes out and repositions the former to form acause-and-effect relation, so to speak, in the resultant work.
Taking this act of separation and recomposition as a way to raise gaps, the artist creates his
photographic pieces as puzzles that, through such gaps, provoke thought and shake the viewer s perception
in a simple and straightforward way. It is also an act of correlating the present, to which the frame
belongs as a physical object, and the past, of which the photograph captures an image, with color as thelink. In such a multilayered way, Isoya attempts to insert gaps into stable, integrated situations.

Speaking of the series of photographs in question, the artist has also stated that it is about attaching aphotograph to the material object called frame, rather than framing a photograph. This remark further
suggests that it is not only what the photograph captures, but also its materiality itself, toward which hisspeculation is set.
Raising various ontological questions, Isoya s multitiered puzzles welcome the viewer s interactions.

Hirofumi Isoya
Born in 1978, received a BA in Architecture and an MFA in Inter Media Arts from Tokyo Universityof the Arts. Subsequent to that he completed the Associate Research programme in Fine Art atGoldsmiths, University of London. Through photographs, sculptures, drawings, as well as
installations that combine them, he reconsiders our perception of material objects and events.
Recent exhibitions include Time Machine, YKG, Tokyo, 2016; Imprisoned, Jailbreak, Imprisoned,Jailbreak," Capsule, Tokyo, 2016; Actual Measurement, Chika Ecoda, Nihon University College ofArt, Tokyo, 2015; The Beach That Never Was, ICAS, Singapore, 2014; Lag, LISTE, Basel, 2014;
Duality of Existence, Friedman Benda, New York, 2014; Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo,Venice, 2013; Tacit Material, RM Gallery and Projects, Auckland, 2013; Counting The Event,Aoyama ¦ Meguro, Tokyo, 2012, among others.
In 2015, three artworks by Isoya were made part of Pompidou Centre s permanent collection.

Contact

Arc (2014）

In the light of the past(2007-2016）

C-print、Painted frame

C-print、Painted frame

Itamuro Onsen Daikokuya
TEL 0287-69-0226

Exhibition Director :Koki Muroi Press: Yukie Bannai,Yoshimi Yagi

FAX 0287-69-0497

E-mail onsen@itamuro-daikokuya.com