Hiromitsu Kuroo | Solo exhibition "Hope Brew"

Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Hope Brew, a solo exhibition of new works from Japanese collage painter Hiromitsu Kuroo’s Bleach Painting series. Requiring few materials while allowing for complex structures and intense sensitivity, the series’ simplicity, feasibility and rigor appeal to Kuroo, who first devised the Bleach Paintings series during COVID-19 pandemic’s long period of uncertainty and scarcity. Using everyday items for creation, the artworks are created on linen canvas using a bleach-based collage technique. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and first in Washington D.C, Hope Brew, will be on view from April 19 - May 18, 2024 at Morton Fine Art’s D.C. space (52 O St NW #302). An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 20, 2024, 2-4pm.

Thinned and sharpened by his use of bleach, the color and forms in Kuroo’s works evince a state of long endurance and erosion. Alongside pandemic necessity, inspiration for the bleach paintings sprung from a memorable 2014 camping trip Kuroo took through Utah and Colorado in the western United States. Viewing many Native American murals, Kuroo was struck both by their artistry and the weathering the works endured outdoors. Explaining his bleach painting process, Kuroo has underscored the importance of restraint and minimal use of paint: “I make the works primarily with bleach, using as little paint as possible. The ability to create beauty out of limited expression is a characteristic of Japanese culture expressed through many art forms, and as a painter working in the manner of the Origami tradition of paper folding, I wanted to carry that feature into my practice.” The canvas serves like paper where the gentle manipulation of its surface conveys intricate textural landscapes.  

Moving from New York City in 2021 (where the artist lived for 18 years) to Saitama, Japan, Kuroo has continued his Bleach Paintings. Hope Brew collects work from the Japan-based period of the series. Building upon his early works, which tended to be smaller works on canvas, Kuroo now incorporates three-dimensional forms in his paintings, adding an expression of light and shadow, as in Bleach C (2024). Seemingly monochromatic, save for some gray smudges and faded blue lines resembling painter's tape, the work reveals brilliant and unexpected color, shade and texture within its folds and panels. Consisting of a grid-like vertical base overlaid with a pinwheel arrangement of attached panels, Bleach C’s collaged forms and layers of battered paint give way to glimpses of green, yellow, sky-blue, gray and faded white, bruise-like smears and sheets of color. The expression of the soft bleached linen canvas and the sharp contrast of colors and shadows mix well together to create the large (34 x22 in.) work. 

The Bleach Paintings command a sense of enduring brilliance and charged resilience, evoking the wan, but indelible-seeming colors and relics of industry while also gesturing to natural forms of entropy and decay. Suggesting a battery of actions, time and rigor, the works in Hope Brew exude an atmosphere of time and story.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

52 O St NW #302, 52 O Street Northwest, Washington, United States