HIRO YAMAGATA

Modern & Contemporary artist Hiro Yamagata was born in Shiga, Japan on June 30, 1948. He was first interested in painting in elementary school and took a special art class every day after school and through high school with his art teacher, a Japanese-style painter. At the age of nineteen he left his home in Malbara, Japan near Kyoto, and began his travels. First he went to Tokyo where he stayed for five years and assisted a professor and worked in advertising  as an illustrator for Coca Cola and Automotive companies. Then he went to Milan, and at age 24, arrived in Paris in 1972, where he began attending L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts and began to live his life through painting. He also painted sets for Peter Brook.  At the time, Hiro was perfecting a “cartoony” illustrative painting style that was not particularly Japanese. The style did so well that his work was picked up on by an outfit in California that specializes in selling undemanding middlebrow art in bulk through venues in shopping malls. Yamagata moved to Los Angeles to oversee the selling of his art, eventually opening a studio in Southern California. In 1997-98, he set out to create Element, a six-part series of environmental installations using theater lights, holographic effects and lasers. Yamagata's desire was to overwhelm the senses by transforming the "white cube" of the gallery into a spatially infinite site where the micro merges with the macro and the limits of the real are expanded. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Tiancheng International have featured Hiro Yamagata's work.