Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present the exhibition Triple Mountain, featuring works by Japanese painter Hiroshi Sugito. In his third solo show in Brazil, the artist presents previously unshown paintings that flirt with both abstraction and figuration.

Sugito has distanced himself from the excess of images characteristic of the Japanese painters of his generation – such as Murakami and Mr. – presenting a sophisticated production characterized by soft colors, transparencies and overlaying. The strong influence his work has received from traditional Japanese painting is evidenced by the presence of nihon-ga style elements. Developed in the 19th century as a means through which Japanese art assimilated Western pictorial approaches, nihon-ga resembles tempera in terms of its texture and color density.

Employing a palette of mainly pastel hues with bursts of fluorescent colors, Hiroshi Sugito creates simple compositions with few elements which nearly always involve an unlikely interplay of proportions. His repertoire includes landscapes and settings that blend interior and exterior in a dreamlike atmosphere. In Rain Clouds, three clouds appear in a space contained between two curtains. In The Split, light rays are reflected in two mirrors in perfect symmetry. On the canvas of Three Trees, three triangular forms with various hues of green stand out against a gray background, depicting the foliage of pine trees. The apparent brushstrokes and thick paint underscore the painting’s materiality.

Hiroshi Sugito was born in 1970 in Nagoya, where he lives and works. Together with Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami, he belongs to the generation of artists who brought Japanese art into the focus of international art criticism in the 1990s. Since then, his work has been shown regularly in institutions and galleries in Japan, Europe and North America. In 2001, he participated in the important exhibition Painting at the Edge of the World, at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA, and in 2003 he took part in the 8th Istanbul Biennial.