Biography

The work of Hiroyuki Masuyama pays homage to the great 19th century landscape artists, reflecting the interrelation between time, space and medium in a distinct and compelling way.

Combining photography and extreme digital image editing, Masuyama works directly with multiple photographs - sometimes numbering in the hundreds, even thousands - to form a composite final image, mirroring a painter's method of working from multiple sketches. Through this process he reproduces works of landscape art from the past.  These images are presented on large-scale light boxes to emphasise their distance from the original in terms of time and medium, while maintaining continuity in terms of content. In the Sharjah Biennial 9, Masuyama exhibited a series of led light boxes titled The Lost Works of Caspar David Friedrich (2007- 08).

Matsuyama's recent solo exhibitions have been held at Mikkeli Art Museum, Finland (2010), Studio la Città, Verona, Italy (2010), and the Louis Vuitton Cultural Space, Hong Kong, (2010). His work has also been shown in group exhibitions at Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria (2010), Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Germany (2009) and Inter Alia Art Company, Seoul, Korea(2008).

Hiroyuki Masuyama attended the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music from 1987–93 where he specialised in oil and mural painting. He received a DAAD scholarship for the Academy of the Arts in Düsseldorf, Germany (1995–99) and subsequently studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne until 2001. He was born in 1968, in Tsukuba City, Japan and currently lives in Düsseldorf.

October 2010