HRD FINE ART

Introduction

HRD Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of a two-man exhibition, titled "In Front of Behind," featuring Ingo Baumgarten, a German painter based in Seoul, Korea, and Takashi Suzuki, a Japanese artist based in Kyoto.

Ingo Baumgarten was born in 1964 in Hannover, Germany. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and the Higher School of Visual Arts in Paris before acquiring his master's degree at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1999. Since 2008 he has been teaching at the Department of Painting at Hongik University in Seoul, Korea, while actively creating his artworks centered on painting.

Takashi Suzuki was born in 1971. Hailing from Kyoto, Suzuki graduated from the Art Institute of Boston in the U.S. before studying at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in Germany, learning from and working with German photographers of fame such as Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth. Currently based in Kyoto, his works are in the collections of reputable Japanese museums including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Baumgarten's works are centered on architectural forms and chromatic compositions. In his recent works in particular, he focuses on the peculiar urban landscapes and building designs in Korea where he currently lives. Though his paintings are characterized by subdued realism, they look eerily fantastical at the same time, while also provoking an argument of picturesque vs. banal.

Working primarily with photographic imagery and techniques, Takashi Suzuki freely departs from and pushes the boundaries of conventional photographic expression. In recent years, his interest in geometric forms has been particularly strong, and his work raises questions about the symbolism and connotation of images and human perception from a variety of perspectives.

This exhibition showcases artworks of the two artists who are fascinated by shapes and forms, thereby aiming to present new, fresh perspectives towards the relations between what is visible and what is hidden behind it. It is also a cross-cultural collaboration between two disparate yet strangely similar artists, a German painter who settled in Korea via Japan and a Japanese artist who studied photography in the U.S. and Germany, re-examining dichotomous ideas such as East and West, painting and photography.

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Takashi Suzuki participates in a group exhibition held at the Shiga Museum of Art, titled "BUTSUDORI: The Photographic Expression of 'Objects,'" opening on January 18, 2025.

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Artists' Statement

My artistic process is based on the perception of my environment- that is now Korea especially Seoul. I am interested in the transformations in society and the way that shows in the cityscape and in the relations of functions and appearances. The well-known landmarks and sights appear in that context less interesting for me than exploring the usually overseen common and typical places, the backgrounds, the places behind.

My paintings display my reflections while at the same time they strive for aesthetic autonomy; with compositions and colors diverting from usual seeing habits.

- Ingo Baumgarten

Everything has its form. And it is difficult to imagine something without knowing its form.

For me, photography is the act of cutting out the real world and giving it a form and meaning different from what it originally was, and looking at the photographed image is to examine the newly given form and explore its meaning.

- Takashi Suzuki