Jacob Hashimoto

This is an important solo show which will flank the artist's well-known wall works with new site-specific ones in which he makes use of completely new and unusual materials. Hashimoto, fascinated by the correlation between space, time, and the astral dynamics of planets and constellations, has created a new series of works in the large rooms of Studio la Città itself; they consist of interactive installations that involve the public completely. Also present in the show is a new series of his traditional "kites" with which, once again, the artist gives a three-dimensional expression to his deep links with nature, and which is here presented as a kind of abstract landscape halfway between reality and the artificial. 

As the curator, Luca Massimo Barbero, says in an essay from 2010: "In his complementary dialectic between emptiness and fullness, Hashimoto aims to discover 'what nature, as nature, makes us hear': his deep syntony with technology finds a way of giving form to space, a space which has the appearance of a nature but with different rhythms and forms determined by its own artificiality. Hence the dialectic between unity and fragments, of infinite parts added together and multiplied: an obsessive accumulation that is first of all a vital and continuous rhythm, an inexhaustible forming process, and an exploration of the very boundaries of the image. And it is in this obsession that we find the positive relationship between continuousness and rethinking, with respect to the past, both his own and of others. Everything flows into Hashimoto's vision of landscape: from the great masters of the avant-garde such as Marcel Duchamp and Kazimir Malevich, to the imaginative fullness of Alexander Calder, the vibrant whites of Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, and the hints of Richard Hamilton and Fred Sandback. All in order to not create an identical copy of nature but to reveal, increasingly receptive yet sensitized, these heavens of artifice and light, to the point of making 'a kind of gigantic color-field painting' of reality." 

Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley, Colorado, in 1973. He lives and works in New York. His output has at times hinted at elements of Japanese art, but the real heart of his work is the creation of three-dimensional structures embodying lightness. At times these take the form of thousands of paper kites suspended in space from nylon threads. Among his principle shows, mention should be made of Armada (2012), Studio la Città, Verona; Gas Giant, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, held concurrently with the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013; his exhibition at the MOCA Pacific Design Center, and Skyfarm Fortress, the Mary Boone Gallery, New York, both in 2014.