Widely recognized as one of Japan's most celebrated artists, Hiroshi Senju is renowned for his paintings of waterfalls. With incredible delicacy, he applies translucent paint onto paper creating the sensation of unrestrained movement. Senju began exploring the waterfall image almost 20 years ago with monumental black and white paintings. He introduced vivid color in 2003 and in 2007 returned to a restrained black and white palette, but with pigments that fluoresce a sublime electric blue when viewed under ultraviolet light. This newest series, being unveiled in Beverly Hills, is a culmination of all of these artistic explorations. In daylight the paintings are subtly colored yet under ultraviolet light they glow an otherworldly blue.
Hiroshi Senju is one of the few modern masters of the thousand-year-old Nihonga style of painting, which emphasizes traditional Japanese techniques and materials. His method, which originated in the Meiji period, involves creating paints by grinding mineral pigments from stone, shell and coral, using an animal-hide binder, and Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board. The resulting images are firmly rooted in Japanese tradition, yet wholly modern with a clear link to abstract expressionism and action painting.
The new works in this show inspire viewers to abandon the mundane world and enter a metaphysical realm. They evoke a deep sense of calm, conjuring not just the appearance of cascading water, but also its sound, smell and feel. The renowned critic Donald Kuspit says, "Unsupported by heaven or earth, yet a kind of angelic ladder between them, Senju's waterfalls have spiritual presence."
Hiroshi Senju was the first Asian artist to receive an individual award at the Venice Biennale. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA), California; The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; The Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music; and the Kushiro Art Museum, Hokkaido, Japan. In 2003, he completed 77 murals at the Annex of Daitokuji-Jyukoin, a prominent Zen Buddhist temple in Japan. He also created a mural for the foyer of the Shinto Shrine at the Grand Hyatt Tokyo. The following year, he was named the art director for Terminal 2 of Tokyo International Haneda Airport where he created a ceiling painting, an installation and a mural. In 2006, he designed a series of new fusuma (sliding screens) for Shofuso, the Japanese House and Garden in Philadelphia. Senju divides his time between New York and Japan, where he is the director of the International Research Center for the Arts and Kyoto University.
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"Aside from exhibiting a wide variety of antiques, the Hong Kong International Art and Antiques fair has also invited contemporary artists to display their latest works. A specially presented work in the fair is Day Falls Night Falls VI by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Senju who was the first Asian artist to receive an individual award in the Venice Biennale. His painting style is a blend of traditional Japanese painting style and contemporary aesthetics."
"Humans need to commune with the elements of nature and art at its best can provide such an experience of communion. Artists often reflect on nature and transform it into intensely condensed metaphors, poems, and songs.Through his sublime paintings, Japanese artist Hiroshi Senju has contemplated multiple facets of water, especially its fundamental power, for almost twenty years [...]n essence, he transforms solid materials from the earth to create images of elusive aquatic torrents."
Sundaram Tagore Gallery showing of Hiroshi Senju's Waterfalls are nature inspired, well crafted paintings that express movement.
"I started painting by brush," Senju says. "It didn't really work the way I wanted it to, It was more like the Hudson River School or the work of 19th-Century European artists, which was not what I wanted to do. The more I painted the more I felt to the two most important elements on the earth - gravity and water. And I thought: why don't I try to use gravity, to pour down the paint from the top?"
"...Senju creates, from the most simple of low-tech means, cinematic spectacles that appear to be in motion. They are startlingly beautiful works - perhaps too beautiful, since we tend to be wary of beauty - and raise the question of optical trickery, although the trickery is completely transparent..."
"Hiroshi Senju, one of the world's most revered and internationally acclaimed contemporary artists, is a painter with divinity."
"Senju says . . . artists can be recognized as worldwide ones only when their works have been publicly recognized as those which have a clear-cut philosophy and vision toward world peace and environmental conservation."
"Coming to the 21st century, we bade farewell to contemporary art of the 20th century . . . realizing that only art works which are recorded in history can lend us encouragement, vitality and healing."
