◯△□

Nobuya Hitsuda

At KAYOKOYUKI, we are pleased to announce the solo exhibition of
Nobuya Hitsuda titled ‘◯△□’
In this exhibition, we will showcase paintings and drawings created since the
1990s, along with newly crafted pieces that use workboards that were used and
passed on from the Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts to Tokyo University
of the Arts’ laboratory rooms.

Hitsuda reconstructs familiar landscapes—mountains, ponds,
vacant parking lots, brick walls, wire fences, crushed cans, and flowers—employing
geometric forms like oblique and straight lines, circles, triangles, and
rectangles, complemented by vibrant and deep colors. This unique approach
compresses distant and close-up views, forming a distinctive spatial
experience. He’s motifs are often everyday landscapes, yet the composition
offers a mysteriously intriguing realm where past and present intersect and
flow continuously.

Born in 1941 in Ota Ward, Tokyo, Hitsuda spent his formative
years in post-war Tokyo, where the ground of the streets were still exposed.
Often climbing up the banks of Tama River, he gazed at the views of the rivers
shifting attitude, shaped by typhoons and floods, and Tokyo’s changing
landscape during the economical boom^[1]
which remains to be the reoccuring scenery of Hitsuda Nobuya’s paintings. His
keen observations of various artworks across eras, along with exposure to
movies, theater, and architecture, became the foundation for constructing rich
sceneries through the accumulation of visual experiences in the city.

The exhibition’s title, “◯△□”
might bring to mind zenga paintings by Sengai. However, the emphasis here seems
to lean more toward the direct morphological meaning of ◯△□ than its religious or symbolic
connotations. The circular imagery that frequents in the exhibition portrays
landscapes in flux, such as ponds, puddles, or vacant parking lots undergoing
construction. Compositions featuring geometric forms lack a vanishing point,
and the interplay of oblique and straight lines introduces fluctuations in the
image. One’s perspective remains unfixed, and one’s gaze meanders diagonally,
vertically, and horizontally from the center, causing the reflected landscape
itself to oscillate.

A landscape that emerges by gathering fragments of scenery from
here and there, “changing its form like a creature while calmly being
there”^[2] in both the past and
present. It is not only Nobuya Hitsuda’s Scenes Passed by but also, perhaps,
the idea that it is one’S owns Scenes Passed by.

Nobuya Hitsuda was born in 1941 in Oota ward, Tokyo, Japan and
currently lives and works in Aichi prefecture. After completing the graduate
course at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1966, he worked
as a lecturer at the said university, and later as a designer in the art department
at NHK Japan Broadcasting Corporation. In 1975 he began teaching at the Aichi
Prefectural University of Fine Arts, and from 2001 to 2009 taught as a
professor at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

He has received the Award for Artist in Nagoya City (1984), the
28th Yasui Grand Prize (1985), and the Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Museum
of Art Grand Prix (2011).

His work has been included in several public collections such as
The National Museum of Modern Art, The Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art,
Tokyo; the Agency for Cultural Affairs; The Toyota Municipal Museum of Art
(Aichi); the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music; the Aichi
Prefectural Museum of Art; The Nagoya City Art Museum (Aichi); The Toyohashi City
Museum Art and History (Aichi); the Aichi Prefectural Art University; The
Tochigi prefectural Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu; The Hamamatsu
Municipal Museum of Art (Shizuoka); The Miyakonojo City Museum of Art (Miyaza-
ki); The Kariya City Art Museum (Aichi) and The Suwa City Museum (Nagano).

In 2009, In the little playground: Hitsuda Nobuya and his
surrounding students, a set of dual exhibitions at the Aichi Prefectural Museum
of Art and the Nagoya City Art Museum, introduced the works of painter and
teacher Nobuya Hitsuda, along with his 19 students including Yoshitomo Nara,
Hiroshi Sugito and Shin Morikita.