KEY HIRAGA: The Elegant Life of Mr. H

Opening reception: Saturday, April 12, 6-8PM

Human life is fleeting, and yet man remains wildly optimistic—a contradiction-riddled, unpredictable, scatterbrained creature, to be sure

Nonaka-Hill brings to Los Angeles the works of Japanese artist, Key Hiraga (b. 1936 - d. 2000). The self-taught painter, a violator of convention, who briefly belonged to the Narrative Figuration movement,  lived and worked in post-war, restructured Tokyo and from 1964 to 1974, in an idealist, radicalized Paris. 

A 29-year-old Hiraga received the National Young Artist Award, a prestigious prize in Japan that granted in 1964 a residency in Paris. That same year, William Lieberman, head curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), visited Hiraga's studio which led to Hiraga’s inclusion in MoMA’s The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition of forty six artists sought to track Japan’s postwar shift from traditional styles of expression to the burgeoning development of broader international tendencies. Once in Paris, Hiraga settled in the Pigalle district, the quartier established as the emblem of the sexual revolution that blazed its way through Europe in the 1880s and which, to date, houses peep shows, venues for lap dances, and nightclubs. Journalist and curator Stéphane Corréard, writes of Hiraga initially finding it “difficult to deal with the proximity of permanent temptation, and no doubt the impossibility of decoding or responding to the erotic enticements and the evolution of the balance of power between men and women, which was particularly rapid in the late 1960s”  Hiraga’s surrounding environment comes to shift and permeate the central themes of his paintings, generating debaucherous, erotic, actively vibrant, hallucinogenic work.  The Elegant Life of Mr. H opens on Saturday, April 12, includes paintings and works on paper spanning from the late 1950’s to 1980’s, and will be on view through May 31, 2025.