Innovative Cliff Painter Hiroshi Senju

Following the successful opening of a museum, the  Hiroshi Senju Museum, dedicated to his work in Karuizawa, Japan, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Ryue Nishizawa, Hiroshi Senju debuts new "Cliffs."

Senju’s "Cliff" paintings are ethereal, intricately rendered landscapes created with mineral pigments on paper. The artist allows delicate rivulets of paint to move across the surface following the natural creases and imperfections in the paper.

Hiroshi Senju was the first Asian artist to receive an Honorable Mention Award at the Venice Biennale. His public installations include monumental murals in Tokyo's Haneda Airport, Grand Hyatt, and Shibuya Cultural Center Owada. His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; SFMoMA in San Francisco; The Museum of Modern Art in Toyama, Japan; Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo; The Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music; and the Kushiro Art Museum, Hokkaido, Japan. He has been the president of the Kyoto University of Art and Design since 2007.

Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1958, Hiroshi Senju is a painter who expresses contemporary modernity with ancient painting techniques that are unique to Japan. He uses this dichotomy to express the connections between Eastern and Western Philosophical traditions. He combines pigments derived from natural materials such as minerals, seashells and coral in a medium of animal-hide glue, and then applies this "paint" to special hand-screened Japanese mulberry paper. Mr. Senju completed a Ph.D. Program in Fine Arts at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1987.

He went on to have a number of solo shows and participated in group exhibitions in Asia, Europe, and the United States. He is the first Asian artist to receive an individual fine arts award at the Venice Biennale for his acclaimed Waterfall paintings in 1995. Some of his more recent exhibitions include Beauty Project at the Museum of Contemporary Art in London in 1996, and a tour of fourteen Japanese cities of his acclaimed Waterfall paintings. Museums that house his work include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Toyama Museum of Contemporary Art in Kushiro, Japan.

Source: Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Images Courtesy: Seesma Blog