Exhibition

Asada Hiroshi was born in Kyoto City in 1931. His father Asada Benji and elder brother Asada Takashi had each made a name for themselves as nihonga painters, but Hiroshi decided to enter the Faculty of Economics at Doshisha University. While a student, he began to study Western-style painting, and in 1954, at the age of twenty-three, he was first selected to exhibit in the Shinseisaku Association exhibition. In the 1950s and 1960s, he concentrated on his painting. Influenced by the Informel trend, he created oil paintings with thickly applied paint, and experimented with Surrealism. During this period he produced large numbers of paintings as he sought out his own style. In 1967, he received the Kyoten (Kyoto Exhibition) Suda Prize, and the following year he was nominated for membership of the Shinseisaku Association.
In 1971, Asada moved to France and set up a studio in Paris, where he worked for eleven years, and was conclusively influenced by classical European paintings. Based on a realist style, he made roads into a new, distinctive world of images that incorporated a religious spirituality. After his return to Japan, he played a part in nurturing a new generation of painters as a professor at Kyoto City University of Arts, and at the same time further refined the deeply spiritual nature of his paintings. Sadly, he took that approach so seriously, and had taken on a mission of such a scale that it was unfinished when he took his own life in his Kyoto studio in 1997.
Last year, a major retrospective of his work was held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto to mark the tenth anniversary of his death, providing the opportunity to comprehend Asada Hiroshi’s oeuvre as a painter. He was particularly well known in the Kansai region, and while still alive, had been presented with the Culture Award Distinguished Service Prize by Kyoto Prefecture, and selected as a Kyoto City Person of Cultural Merit. When he held a solo exhibition in New York in 1995, Elton John famously bought one of his works, but in Tokyo, very few of Asada’s works are held in museum collections, and awareness of his paintings is far from sufficient. This exhibition focuses mainly on his later output, including precious unexhibited works, in an attempt to explore the world of the paintings by an artist who poured his whole body and soul into his work.