“There is another world, but it is in this one.” - Paul Eluard
In Tenki Hiramatsu’s paintings, the noirish outlines of elusive figures are obscured by their technicolor backdrops. They maintain the blank mysteriousness of the perpetual stranger, allowing Hiramatsu to move freely between dissimilar genres and styles, borrowing the aggressive mark-making of German Expressionism while filtering it through a more oblique, conceptual sensibility drawn from artists like Walter Swennen and René Daniels.
Hiramatsu treats each painting as an opportunity to destabilize expectation, working primarily in oil paint, sometimes incorporating wax and acrylic, rotating panels and canvases in 90° increments over weeks or months, layering pigments until figures materialize organically from his brushstrokes. This method invites a dialogue between control and chance, yielding paintings that feel simultaneously immediate and deeply contemplative. His shadowy characters seem perpetually caught in transit, like arriving in the middle of a story already underway. They leave the impression of objects seen from the window of a fast-moving train: always receding, elusive in their incompleteness, resisting any fixed interpretation.
Tenki Hiramatsu (b. 1986, Wakayama, Japan) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He received his BA from Nihon University College of Art, Tokyo, and completed his Aufbaustudium at State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe under Marcel van Eeden and Daniel Roth. Selected solo and two-person presentations include Super Dakota, Brussels (2025); Gabi, Leipzig (2025); ARTRO, Kyoto (2025); Barbara Seiler Galerie, Zurich (2024, 2022); Half Gallery, New York (2024); Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2024). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Penumbral’ (with Nate Lowman), Galerie Sardine, New York (2025); ‘Scotopia,’ Cabin, New York (2024); ‘Splendore – joie, joie, joie...,’ Fondation Fernet Branca, Saint-Louis (2024); ‘Me and My Shadow / My Shadow and i,’ Europa, New York (2023); ‘Tenki and Jerry’ (with Jerry the Marble Faun), Castle, Los Angeles (2023). He was awarded the Kunstpreis der Werner-Stober-Stiftung in 2022.
Tenki Hiramatsu
Post Fair
February 26 – February 28, 2026
Post Fair
February 26 – February 28, 2026