Broken Hearts are For Assholes

S12 Gallery and Workshop is proud to present the exhibition “Broken Hearts are for Assholes” by the renowned and Bergen-based multi-artist Kiyosho Yamamoto, from the 12th of September througout the 20th of December 2020. The titel quotes a song by the american artist Frank Zappa, and can be an indicator of some of the mistrust and downright aversion the artist intitially felt towards the material – glass – from which he through his stay as a resident artist in our workshop has transformed into a healing process to something intensely beautiful, unmistakably personal, and forthcoming art.

Kiyoshi Yamamoto

Kiyoshi Yamamoto (1982-) graduated with a Masters of Art from the Academy for Art and Design in Bergen, Norway in 2013, and he has also studied at the  Escola de Bellas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at St. Martin’s School for Art and Design in London, England.

Yamamoto has later had a series of solo exhibition, amongst other places at Buskerud Kunstsenter, Heimdal Kunstforening, Norske Grafikere and Soft Galleri, all of these in Norway. His works have been bought by amongst several institutions the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum in Trondheim, Kode Kunstmuseer og komponisthjem in Bergen, and the Norwegian embassy in Brazilia.

Textiles

Kiyoshi’s works are mold breaking, unifying, and they are challenging conventional art arenas and conventions alike. He has a background in fashion studies, and as an artist he is primarily known for his works in textiles. Using his enormous spreads, shawls and canvases he continues to give physical shape to our experience both sculpturally and architectonically. He has in this way, and through a series of exhibitions in some of Norway’s leading galleries, established himself as a pathfinder between material based objects, via visual arts and prints towards performance- and installation art and sophisticated embellishment.

Colours 

More than anything, Kiysohi is recognized by his color scheme . Sometimes sparkling, energetic and confrontational, but mostly reflective, poetic and harmonious he works in a pallett we do not often encounter in our domestic, moth-covered granite and fog founded habitat. I rather stir us up, and invite us to join him in a coral reef like experience.

Not unlike scales seen used by other international artists such as Josef Albers, Paul Gaugin and not the least Henri Matisse, but also used by Norwegian Johannes Rian, Kiyoshi colours contribute to the narrative. Together with the form and the format, the colours establish both conditions and rhetoric, whilst at the same time they are both pleasing and irresistable. Not unlike Mark Rothkos characteristic and meditative abstractions, Kiyoshi Yamamotos art establishes contemplative rooms offering both calm, and surreal vigor simultaneously. His color chart-mapping may in some of his objects at times come across as psychedelic, in the understanding that it contributes to expand our inner experience.

Glass

Kiyoshi had, as initially indicated, a traumatic experience with glass after a car accident where he literally experienced being physically scared. His preparative workshop project at S12 therefore dealt with approaching the materials potential healing properties. He asked himself if glass, combined with color, could work as a vessel for recovery? The answer is according to his own words, manifested in a meeting between love, fear and recognition.

This is the art event we all need now, and maybe more so than ever before. We need to be able to reunite and really meet each other again, safely and responsibly in the creative and exploratory realm, in the exhilarating and healing.

S12 editor: Written in September 2020.