NEW YORK, NY.- Kristen Lorello is presenting a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Takuji Hamanaka. It is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery and deepens his ongoing research of traditional Japanese woodcut printmaking and polychrome, collage-based abstraction. Softening forms found in nature as well as a play between dense patterns of color and areas of open space inspire this new group of images. A full color brochure with a new essay by Melinda Narro, Curatorial Assistant for Prints & Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is available.

Utilizing the 19th Century Bokashi technique, where an unevenly inked block is pressed onto paper to produce a gradated effect, Hamanaka cuts and collages sections of printed papers into vibrant patterns that suggest organic structures. His new works are a blend of rigid and softening forms, colors that form and recede, and past and present artistic traditions. As Narro writes: “Kaleidoscopic and captivating, these compositions entice with vibrant colors, bold forms, and lively patterns that bely their own static nature, seeming to oscillate and pulse before our eyes.” Each work includes a background pattern comprised of papers printed in a single hue and an overlaid pattern of solid forms in a two-color combination. The resulting compositions imply movement in various directions as in Dayflower, and Evening Flower, where narrow concentric circles meet petal-like shapes that seem to bud from a central point. Inspired more by nature than architecture in this new series, Hamanaka has chosen a reference to ‘Crown Shyness’ for the exhibition’s title. The phenomenon refers to the tendency of tree canopies in a forest to not touch each other, leaving spatial gaps between them that share a visual relationship to the separation of spatial forms in Hamanaka’s works.

Takuji Hamanaka was born in 1968 in Hokkaido, Japan and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX, the Fleming Museum, The University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, the Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, the New York Presbyterian Hospital, the Center for Book Arts, and Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, among others. Recent exhibitions include ‘Takuji Hamanaka,’ Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY, 'Elastic Bandwith,' McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY, and 'Visible Rhythms: Pattern and Color, Center for Contemporary Printmaking,' Norwalk, CT. Hamanaka is the 2022 recipient of a prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the recipient numerous other grants and awards including, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Printmaking (2023, 2017, and 2011), the Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant (2021), and the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant (2020). He was a fellow at the Kala Art institute, Berkeley, CA in 2016 and a Barbara and Thomas Putnam Fellow at MacDowell Colony in 2013. From 1986-89 Hamanaka trained at the Adachi Institute of Woodblock printmaking in Tokyo, Japan. His work has been discussed in The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and Printmaking Today, among other publications.