Exhibition - Idle Day Dreams
Artist - Hiro Sakaguchi
Opening Reception - Saturday September 12th 6pm – 8pm
Dates - Sept 12 – Oct 27
Location: Seraphin Gallery
1108 Pine Street Philadelphia PA 19107
Email: seraphin@seraphingallery.com
Phone Number: 215-923-7000
Seraphin Gallery is pleased to announce, Idle Daydreams, an exhibition of painting, drawings, and sculpture by Seraphin Gallery artist Hiro Sakaguchi.
Sakaguchi’s new works are both enigmatic and otherworldly. They are gloomier than the past and show an artist situated between extraordinary turmoil and the youthful fantasy which one wishes to rediscover. The assembled works include an airplane traffic jam, the eye of a hurricane, and a hitchhiker trying to walk onto an airplane wing. Like all of Sakaguchi’s work, they carry a sense of whimsy, a fleeting moment only now visualized with paint.
But not everything is so gleeful. Sakaguchi uses war imagery as references throughout his new works. In Great Wall, he uses a tank from the former Soviet Union, a Humvee with a rocket launcher, a civil war battalion, and a da Vinci tank, as devices which try to unsuccessfully destroy a wall which protects a sitting house from a distance.
There is an elusive sense of safety which is looking to be grasped, both physically and emotionally. In one such painting, an ant farm sits below the surface displaying snapshots of a dorm room, friends who are white water rafting, and a barbeque, all visually separated by ants and twisting tunnels. Additionally, in Bear Fishing, a bear stops a plane from swimming upstream –not allowing it to go home.
Sakaguchi’s works have developed into a mix of memory and fantasy. They are both conceptual and emotive relying on fantasies of childhood boredom. As Sakaguchi states, “I am trying to recapture what I was never able to do as a child with the means I have now.”
Sakaguchi’s has exhibited works at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, The Woodmere Art Museum, and Delaware Center of Contemporary Art. His works are in the permanent collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Woodmere Art Museum
Idle Daydreams will open on Saturday, Sept. 12 from 6pm -8pm. The exhibition will run from Sept. 12 – October 27th. Please view his works on Seraphin Gallery’s website at by clicking here.