TEZUKAYAMA GALLERY is pleased to present At once everywhere  Painting is a body, a solo exhibition by Yasuko Hirano.

Born in Toyama Prefecture in 1985 and currently based in Kanagawa, Hirano graduated from the Oil Painting Course in the Department of Fine Arts at Kyoto Seika University. Since then, she has continued to produce and present her work actively.

Hirano’s paintings are constructed by stretching canvas over wooden panels, applying a ground of animal glue and gesso, sanding the surface after drying, and repeatedly layering oil paint in the three primary colors.

At the foundation of her work lies the notion of “landscape.” However, this is not a simple reproduction of visual information. Rather, physical sensory elements—such as sight, smell, and touch—are integrated with mental components derived from memory and emotion and reconfigured into images that embody a multilayered sense of time. For Hirano, painting is the very process through which perception and memory emerge into space via the body. The “circular dots” that appear on the surface function as markers indicating that the process of mixing paint has reached completion and that the work has transformed into an autonomous presence confronting the viewer. Through the repetition of the act of painting and the accumulation of subtle deviations that accompany it, what emerges is not a fixed time or memory, but a bodily space that is continuously renewed.

In this exhibition, Hirano engages for the first time with horizontally oriented compositions. The exhibition is structured so that relationships between works are generated through the continuity of the production process itself. These interrelations are not intended to communicate a specific narrative or message to the viewer; rather, they appear as an inevitable spatial configuration resulting from the sustained layering of artistic actions.

[Artist Statement] 

My practice has long been concerned with how time, memory, and perception arise within the body, and how they are experienced as they interfere with and overlap one another.

The sense of time I encounter through making is not linear.
At times, the past seems to move backward and arrive in the present.
At others, different temporalities intersect without being clearly separated. While remaining in the “here and now,”
I sometimes feel as though I am simultaneously touching another time.

In this exhibition, I work primarily with horizontal compositions.
By doing so, I intentionally remove structures that cause the gaze to converge at a single point, as well as spatial constructions based on perspective or horizons.
Within the pictorial field, the viewer’s gaze does not settle but drifts, moving back and forth across the surface.

In my process, the act of painting is not a one-time gesture of expression. Rather, I place emphasis on the process itself, tracing the same actions and structures repeatedly, allowing subtle shifts to emerge over time.
Through repetition, time and memory appear not as fixed entities, but as things that overlap, transform, and are continually renewed.

For me, painting is not a complete image to be looked at from a distance.
It is a place where relationships between the body, the environment, and time come into being.
Painting is a trace of having touched time.

Yasuko Hirano