NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami will present Of Two, Naotaka Hiro’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Hiro continues his dialectical approach to mark-making, working across canvas, wood, and bronze. “Whether drawing or painting,” Hiro says, “my practice unfolds in two steps: the first is subjective, intuitive, and organic; the second is objective and analytical. These steps repeat, with two personas—instinctive and reflective—continually agreeing and conflicting throughout the work.”

For his wood paintings, Hiro works beneath each panel as it hovers horizontally a foot above the floor. He pushes his body against the underside, so close to the surface that he cannot discern his progress, at least until he flips the panels over to observe, analyze, and edit the paintings from above. Likewise with Hiro’s vertical unstretched canvas works, the artist wraps his body in the loose material, painting and drawing in two-hour intervals before unfurling the fabric to reveal the performance within. Holes, slits, and ropes which perforate the canvas provide frameworks within which the artist encounters his surface, transgressing his own procedures as often as he observes them. The resulting paintings evince the artist’s presence, laying bare an index of gestures; “red lines trace movement, green fields denote stillness, and asterisks mark fixed point —eyes, nostrils, nipples, genitals—these traces, like anatomical diagrams or maps, index the physical and emotional states of their making.”

Hiro’s processes recall his origins as a solo filmmaker, performing both in front of and behind the camera. Like these one-person productions, Hiro’s paintings and sculptures emerge from the dual positions of actor and director, creator and viewer, subject and object. Working from under and above, inside and outside, and constantly inhabiting states of production and post-production, Hiro creates works which “oscillate between subjective immersion and objective analysis.”

In the small room, Hiro envelops the viewer in his largest canvas works to date Sandwaves, Internally, Volumes 1 and 2. The artist sprayed, marked, dotted, and drew along 41 feet across two canvasses pulled tight with ropes. The wavelike patterns that emerge are evidence of his physical efforts in wrestling with the folded and trussed canvas. As the viewer moves from left to right within the small room, they retrace the artist’s steps across its length.

In the center of the gallery, Hiro’s bronze cast doubles sit, as if meditating. The pair of sculptures, Plot, Perpetual and Plot, Rerouted, emerge from a sort of durational performance in which the artist allows silicone to dry on his body as he holds a pose, capturing his subtle shifts and movements despite all efforts to remain still. After removing the mold, he further exaggerated and incised the lines inscribed in each surface, tracing the creases and wrinkles of his body.

These deformed and imperfect lifecasts function more as reinterpretations than replications of himself. Through these processes, Hiro writes, “distinctions blur, contradictions coexist, and a singular presence emerges—one that is always, inherently, of two.”

Naotaka Hiro (b. 1972, Osaka, Japan) lives and works in Pasadena, California. Hiro received his BA from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997, and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, in 2000. His work is in the collections of MoMA, New York; The Whitney Museum, New York; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; and many more. Hiro’s work has also been exhibited at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; LAXART, Los Angeles; Centre d’Art Contemporain, La Ferme du Buisson, France, among others. Hiro has had solo exhibitions at Herald Street, London; The Box, Los Angeles; Misako & Rosen, Tokyo; Brennan & Griffin, New York; and Shane Campbell, Chicago. He is the recipient of grants and awards from the Art Matters Foundation and the Asian and Pacific Islander Artist Presenting Initiative. In December 2025, Hiro will be included in Roppongi Crossing, a triennial exhibition of Japanese artists at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.