HIROSHI SENJU

Hiroshi Senju has been conveying in paint nature’s power and ability to inspire awe for more than 30 years. He began exploring the waterfall image in the 1990s and today, theyare in public spaces and museum collections worldwide, including those of TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the ArtInstitute of Chicago, where a site-specific Waterfall is on view in a gallery designed byTadao Ando through March 13, 2022.

Senju’s falls are often inspired by natural landscapes, including the rugged, almost prehistoric terrain of northern Oahu, where cascades of water flow over ancient cliffs(Beginnings, 2020). However, this new body of work is a pure expression of the artist’sunfettered imagination, a visually resplendent response to working in isolation at his NewYork studio throughout 2020.

To capture the spectrum of colour he had conjured in his mind for this series, Senju turned to manmade pigments, in addition to the bespoke natural pigments he traditionally uses.Produced in Japan, these pigments are derived from coloured glass composed of high-firedglaze and metal oxide and are made using the same care and exacting standards as hisnatural pigments.

Although Senju is widely known for his black-and-white Waterfalls, his skill as a colourist is clearly evident in this body of work, particularly in a suite of four paintings in whichnuanced shifts in tone and shade not only evoke the sensation of falling water, but theessence of the changing seasons. ‘When you see the world from the inside of a waterfall,the soft hues of spring flowers will be seen through the falling water as a field of colours,’ hesays. ‘In the same way, summer is the harmony of various greens. Autumn is the colour ofleaves that become more brilliant just before they fall. In winter, there may be a sense ofloneliness after everything has fallen, yet at the same time, there is a feeling of renewal.’

In the central work of the show, pictured above, the artist brings together the colours from the four seasons in a sweeping, multi-panel panorama. In this Waterfall, liquid ribbons ofred, gold, purple, blue and green appear between towering columns, as if a mist of waterdroplets is fracturing the light into a spectrum of colour like a prism. At the base of thewaterfall, the colours coalesce into a deep, blue-black pool that alludes to the depth belowthe surface.

Senju’s colour explorations also include a small group of Waterfalls that are more distilled. In these works, the waterfall is centred between three distinct colour fields. The relationshipbetween the pair of colours in the background strikes a beautiful balance, yet it’s theinclusion of the third colour in the foreground that introduces an unexpected harmony. Whenselecting the combinations, rather than draw on a specific theme, Senju relied on instinct. ‘The colours called for one another,’ he says.

Rounding out the range of colours and mediums are three luminous, warm gray Waterfalls made with platinum pigment, a material Senju began using in 2020. He delights in itsrefined yet understated nature, in which the platinum’s lustre plays off the soft white oyster-shell pigment used to articulate the waterfall itself.

Senju purposefully included these subtle, monochrome paintings in this new body of work not as a foil to the more colourful works presented alongside them, but as a way toencourage viewers to see the beauty in diversity and in the world as it is.