slicing apples Hiroshi Sugito

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present slicing apples, Hiroshi Sugito’s first solo exhibition in New York City since 2007.  

Seeing the familiar anew defines the acclaimed Japanese artist’s latest works, which translate tactile sculptural processes into painting. Reflecting the artist’s wish to perceive through combination over comparison, the exhibition’s title relates to an analytical sensibility where acts of cutting open new ways of seeing. Sugito’s constructions complicate the relationships between image and object, interior and exterior, creating space and depth across two-dimensional planes. Dashes, lines, arcs, and triangles converge between figuration and abstraction. On linen and paper, pigments mark unstretched supports, while porous surfaces retain traces of the artist’s process within their final state. Striking core-like vessels and arched slices bear the lines of a knife to reveal intersections.  

As forms separate and divide, Sugito composes spatial harmonies that drift between the quotidian and the poetic. Structures reappear throughout the exhibition: green chambers with dappled light, each interposed with strokes of coral or pale blue. Through this repetition of form and color, Sugito builds a visual rhythm, syncopated and irreverent. Choosing to install the artworks himself, the artist presents the works almost as they can be seen in his studio, allowing the paintings and the architecture of the gallery to interact. 

Sugito’s unconventional path began with years spent as a woodsman and cultivating fields in the mountains, until he turned to painting in 1996. His study of Nihonga (日本画)1 at the Aichi Prefectural University of Arts shaped his techniques with mineral pigments and stressed theconceptual rigor of his approach. According to the artist, “dusty memories of autumn” permeate the exhibition and its paintings, yet what emerges resists representation. Sugito’s practice often engages between mundane and ineffable experiences, a duality that runs throughout the work. The artist, among a divergent source of influences, cites the oblique influence of Robert Irwin’s experiments with light and Ellsworth Kelly’s pictorial elements, yet builds a singular material relationship to plasticity, using paint to meteorically gather and disperse forms. “The dream,” Sugito says, on painting the sculptural, “is to find a nice shape that I put my hands on – in my studio, I know no acorn is going to fall on my head, but I sit and wait.”  

The exhibition is shaped by an “aesthetics of adjacency,” where formal difference and association propose new situations of encounter. Curved fields rise in rhythmic succession, their interiors animated by cerulean, gray-blue, and vermilion, while rectangles and diagonals drift through translucent fields. Sugito has completed the works in situ, participating directly in the installation process, to allow relationships to inhabit the room as they emerge. Less objects to be seen than ones that provoke delicate ways of seeing, slicing apples invites close observation into imagined landscapes that hold both curiosity and disquiet. 

Hiroshi Sugito (b. 1970, Nagoya, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. 

Recent solo exhibitions include candy wrap, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo (2025) apples and lemon, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2024); Remainder, Lulu, Mexico City (2023); Hiroshi Sugito: the garden with Zenzaburo Kojima, Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles (2022); Hiroshi Sugito:module or lacuna, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo (2017); particles and release, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi (2016); prime and foundation, Miyagi Museum of Art, Miyagi (2015); and frame and refrain, Musée Bernard Buffet, Shizuoka (2015).  

Recent and notable group exhibitions include MINEBANE! Contemporary Art – The Taguchi Art Collection, Akita Museum of Art and Akita Senshu Museum of Art, Akita (2025); How Did You Come into the World?, Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Aomori (2024); Does the Future Sleep Here?, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (2024); Winter Garden: The Exploration of the Micropop Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Art, curated by Midori Matsui, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2009); Japanisches Kulturinstitut, Cologne (2009);and Japan Foundation, Toronto (2010); Garden of painting – Japanese Art of the 00s, National Museum of Art, Osaka (2010); Logical Emotion – Contemporary Art from Japan, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland (2015); Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale), Halle (2015); among others. 

The artist’s works are held in permanent collections at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Saatchi Collection, London; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and Taguchi Art Collection, Japan.