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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

For his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, the painter, sculptor and photo artist HIROYUKI MASYAMA focuses on perspectives from the Free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg, in an attempt to redefine the relationship between space and time.

Hiroyuki Masuyama is known for his pictorial objects, which in some instances explicitly refer to European traditions, such as romantic landscape or baroque still-life paintings. The principle of seriality he systematically follows gives his work process a meditative dimension. He might, for example, carry a flower with him over a certain period of time, photographing one of the blossoms in his hand every hour, and recording the stages until it fades. The photographs of the withering vegetal in its various states are digitally superimposed, merging the sequences. What is in reality a chronological succession of phases is transformed into a single simultaneous moment, with one resulting image that follows the traditional composition of still-lifes.

The conceptual approach of Hiroyuki Masuyama is always based on his interest in crafting an image, as well as in the beauty of the original subjects. His work is characterized by a romantic approach paired with deconstruction of the objects: for a new series of works, he repeatedly traced the contours of the shadow of individual flower petals and of a tree leaf with a pencil, at specific times. Overlaid, the drawings poetically capture the passage of time on paper, as the leaf that starts fresh and flat begins to crumble.

Going back to the roots of image making, he uses the primary technique of pencil and paper to mimic the digital mediums typical of his practice and reverses a numeric thought process to bring it back to fundamental analog principles.

In one of the four large-format photo collages on show, Masuyama uses a computer image processing software to combine in one picture hundreds of shots of the sky over the port of Hamburg taken at different moments between sunrise and sunset.

The 360° panorama of the city was shot last summer, when the artist set up his camera on the viewing platform of the Elbphilharmonie. Spending 24 sleepless hours high above the city, he systematically moved one meter every 10 minutes, manually pressing the trigger of his camera with every shift.

Embedding this multitude of photos into a bigger picture, he creates a new sense of time in which different periods exist simultaneously. Reflecting on the dissolution of a centuries-old understanding of space and time, cosmic light-years suddenly become ephemeral.

Hiroyuki Masuyama also links the past and present to the future with an invitation to a time-traveler to come from the future and celebrate his opening with him. In I am awaiting you four flagstones investigate the far-reaching question: what will outlast us in the next 1000 years?

Hiroyuki Masuyama was born in 1968 in Tsukuba near Tokyo. In 1995, he received a DAAD scholarship to attend the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, where he still lives and works today. Masuyama has participated in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad over the past 20 years and his works are in major collections such as the Kunsthalle Hamburg; Kunsthaus Zurich; Quandt House, Bad Homburg; UBS, Zurich; Gertsch Museum, Burgdorf / Switzerland, Montblanc Hamburg; DKV Munich Re; Kunsthalle Bremen and the Pomeranian State Museum, Greifswald. At the moment, his exhibition "Minima x Maxima" can be seen in the Städtische Galerie Offenburg until 16 February 2020.