Naotaka Hiro: Peaking
Installation View
Photo Courtesy of The Box Los Angeles

Naotaka Hiro: Peaking at The BOX, LA

By Shana Nys Dambrot

Through January 28th

Shaped canvas paintings are not often emotionally expressive, favoring the precise curves and angles of custom frames over the bohemian flaunting of rough-edges and raw remnants. Instances of attacking, slicing, piercing, puncturing, and otherwise compromising the painted surface through draping, crumpling, reversing and ruching are more emotive, obscuring image and content in ways that can feel subversive, destructive, violent, but also risk seeming calculated for effect. Naotaka Hiro’s current exhibition at The Box literally and figuratively turns these art historical tropes inside out, presenting a series of engaging, vivacious, visceral and absolutely disruptive carved-up canvases (and related series of frenetic works on paper, surreal bronze body-cast sculptures, and performative action-painting video) that reinvigorate these practices.

Naotaka Hiro: Peaking
Installation View
Photo Courtesy of The…