Hideaki Yamanobe
11.10.2025 - 15.11.2025
The Peak
Japan Art - Galerie Friedrich Müller
Hideaki Yamanobe unfolds a quiet, almost meditative pictorial world in his paintings. Nuanced gradations of white and gray on a black background create abstract spaces that suggest more than they name. Associations emerge from the pictorial surfaces like a rising haze, taking shape for a moment only to immediately disappear again into indeterminacy.
Yamanobe's works remarkably combine a contemporary, minimalist visual language with the traditions of East Asian landscape painting. His works breathe the spirit of the 'haboku' ink technique developed in Japan in the 15th century - the 'broken' painting technique in which forms are dissolved. Central to this is the deliberate use of emptiness ('ma') as a creative means. These empty spaces are not merely an absence, but through their contrast to the executed form create a subtle field of tension that invites imagination and contemplation. While the masters of the Muromachi period always drew on concrete motifs such as landscapes, Yamanobe remains entirely committed to abstraction.
Nevertheless, his paintings invite the viewer to wander over their surface as if over a snow-covered plateau. Spontaneously applied, glazed layers of paint form diffuse structures reminiscent of wafts of mist, clouds or rock formations. Despite the greatest reduction, they seem to echo the sublimity of the mountain world - and thus those moments of clarity and stillness that the artist himself experienced when climbing the Zugspitze and Mont Blanc. The areas of color condense into a landscape, which in turn becomes a metaphor: The mountain stands not only for itself as a natural form, but as a symbol of life. Like climbing the rocky slopes, this is arduous, the path uncertain. The long striving for the summit, reaching its peak as a moment of triumph and the greatest happiness, followed by the inevitable descent into the depths - this ambivalence echoes the Japanese concept of 'mono no aware': the melancholy awareness of the beauty of the fleeting and the transience of all things.
Yamanobe's aesthetic of reduction is rooted in the Japanese art tradition as an expression of spiritual depth and truthfulness. When viewing his works, a field of tension unfolds between formal stillness and inner pictorial power, leading the viewer to contemplative immersion and existential reflection in equal measure.
Xenia Ressos
Japan Art - Galerie Friedrich Müller
Braubachstraße 9
60311 Frankfurt am Main
T. +49 69 282 839
E. mail@japan-art.com