Hiro Yokose

Untitled #5250

2012

Hiro Yokose is a Japanese modern contemporary painter who was born in 1951. Yokose fuses multiple layers of wax and oil paint to create mysterious, veiled landscapes illuminated with flashes of light in the sky and on the water. His works are imagined, dream shrouded landscapes that impart the viewer with a sense of contemplation and stillness. His technique involves a unique layering of beeswax and oil paint giving the work a rich sense of depth, texture and luminosity. Yokose’s painting style evokes a traditional Japanese painting aesthetic of delicate, lyrical greens, browns and blues, yet the atmospheric works possess their own sense of serenity and a postmodernist balance between painterly abstraction and representation. His newest work is punctuated with warm golden casts of light to elicit pure and tranquil moments of luminosity and space. 

Yokose often paints a low horizon line in his compositions, illuminating the rest of the canvas with Turneresque skies and quiet, misty landscapes. In this way, his work hovers between a Zen-like minimalist abstraction and a traditional landscape. Playing with the viewer’s perception, Yokose’s sensual works invite engagement in a simultaneous experience of recognition and mystery. Hiro Yokose’s work is included in many public collections, among them is the San Jose Museum of Art, Harvard University at Cambridge, Goldman Sachs and Co. in San Francisco, Microsoft in Redmond, Boeing Corporation in Chicago, TransAmerica Corporation in San Francisco, Prudential in New York, Exxon Corporation in Texas; Fidelity Investments in Boston, Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D.C. and Citibank in New York.