Late 20th Century Art Poster Signed by Artist, Yamagata - Framed

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Biography from the Archives of askART
"Hiro Yamagata biographical photo
The following information was submitted February 2006 by Norman Davies, … Read more Biography from the Archives of askART
"Hiro Yamagata biographical photo
The following information was submitted February 2006 by Norman Davies, art scholar and book dealer from Torrance, California. His source is the book Hiro Yamagata Earthly Paradise, by Edward Leffingwell.


At the age of nineteen he left his home in Malbara, Japan near Kyoto, and began his travels. First he went to Tokyo where he stayed for five years and assisted a professor and worked in advertising as an illustrator for Coca Cola and Automotive companies. Then he went to Milan, and at age 24, arrived in Paris in 1972. There he met many writers and musicians that had some influence on his work, and he was introduced to the French Poet Jacques Prevert, whose influence took shape in Yamagata's paintings.

Yamagata said: "Everything is put in the image". He does not express interest in talking about art, has no art theory, and doesn't want to have one. For him art is in the process of trying to break the mold, not in the drawings or paintings themselves.

His travels also included Morocco, Greece, Turkey, and Algeria, and then he moved to Los Angeles in 1978. He continues to travel, and spends much time in Fiji.

Embroidered with imaginative narrative and detail, Yamagata's Los Angeles paintings often specifically recall a Paris that still attracts him, that recalls the years which for him remain the most exciting, the most meaningful. In some of these paintings, the comic inversions of Botero-like figures pilot automobiles from another period.

In 1987 he decided to reverse the scale of this intimate work by presiding over the restoration and transubstantiation of the classic automobile and using its body as his canvas. This was a painting he could complete, literally enter, and drive away. At the time, he had no idea that this vision of the ultimate Los Angeles cruising machine would lead to others, and direct him towards making a group of "paintings" for an exhibition that might in some ways eventually alter the way art can be perceived." See less