Sydney Contemporary
September 11 – 14th, 2025
Carriageworks
image: Keisuke Matsuura Jiba pek 40, 2025, magnet, acrylic on canvas, 63 x 53 x 5cm, Courtesy of Five Walls Gallery
KEISUKE MATSUURA
Since the 1990s, Japanese artist Keisuke Matsuura has been developing a practice that explores geometry and natural phenomena. Born in Kyoto in 1970, he studied at Tama Art University, Tokyo, before relocating to Germany in 1997 to complete his studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Christian Megert and Daniel Buren. Now based in Düsseldorf, Matsuura regularly exhibits across Europe and Asia, presenting both gallery exhibitions and ambitious outdoor installations. His work engages with the subtle interplay of structure and contingency, revealing form through its interaction with light, air, and environmental conditions.
During his formative years in Tokyo, Matsuura encountered the work of the ZERO artists and later visited their exhibitions in Europe. Their geometric clarity and engagement with light and space left a decisive impression. Building on these ideas, Matsuura developed his own approach, one that positions geometry within natural environments and subjects it to the unseen forces of air, light, magnetism, and vibration. In works such as weiße nepix (Moers, 2011), le nôtre – spiegelungen (Benrath Palace, Düsseldorf, 2012), and Weißer Steinborn (2023), rational structures of fabric and poles were transformed by shifting wind and illumination, making form visible precisely through its susceptibility to change.
Matsuura’s practice is also informed by the Japanese concept of ku, or “emptiness,” drawn from Zen and Mahayana Buddhism. Ku signifies impermanence and interdependence—an absence of fixed essence—and describes a space where subtle energies and transformation reside. This philosophy helps explain how his works invite us to perceive what is normally unseen, producing art that is both precise and contingent.
These ideas are central to his ongoing Jiba-Pek series. In these works, monochrome canvases are shaped by hidden magnetic fields: magnets placed behind the stretcher exert localized forces, creating subtle concave and convex deformations that push outward or pull inward. While the canvases maintain their geometric clarity, they also reveal an inherent instability. The monochrome surfaces come alive with quiet distortions, visual rhythms, and the presence of these unseen forces.
For Sydney Contemporary 2025, Matsuura presents new works from his Jiba-Pek series. These paintings invite viewers to engage not only with the monochrome surfaces themselves, but also with the subtle forces that shape them. By balancing geometric clarity with the unpredictability of hidden magnets, the works reveal how structure and instability coexist. The canvases respond to air, light, and magnetic fields, producing quiet distortions and visual rhythms that bring the unseen into perception.
Matsuura has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at Imura Art Gallery (Kyoto), Chabot Fine Art (The Hague), and Stiftung Schloss und Park Benrath (Düsseldorf), as well as site-specific installations at Museum Insel Hombroich and the ZERO Foundation, Düsseldorf. His work has been included in major group exhibitions such as the Socle du Monde Biennale (Herning, Denmark), Resonance: Walter Leblanc – Keisuke Matsuura at the Walter Leblanc Foundation (Brussels), and PAN Amsterdam.
Public collections holding his work include the Max Bill Foundation, Stiftung Schloss und Park Benrath, Walter Leblanc Foundation, and Hino Motors, among others.
image: Sean Hogan, In the mirror, a window pane, 2025, 432 x 609mm, Synthetic polymer aerosol on acrylic sheet, aluminium frame, Courtesy of Five Walls Gallery
Sean Hogan
A pigment sprayed. A colour looking for a friend. A painting unseen. A language spoken backwards.
Hogan begins with a single word, image, or gesture—a poetic kernel that sparks his thinking. From this, he develops a framework rooted in system theory and complexity science, drawing on geometry, colour, proportion, and materiality. His works explore dualities such as complexity/simplicity, order/disorder, and connection/disconnection.
In series such as Nevermore, repetition and system-driven sequences allow subtle shifts in time, space, and mood to emerge, producing visual and temporal variation. Hogan’s engagement with contemporary content is evident in works like Volume 1, 2022 (Melbourne Now, NGV), which visualised redacted pages of the Mueller Report as monochrome horizontal lines, exploring the intersections of information, politics, and perception.
For Sydney Contemporary 2025, Hogan has produced a new body of work titled The Disconnect Paintings. Painted by hand with spray cans—a gesture recalling early cave paintings—these works reference the Roman god Janus, figure of dual perspectives, thresholds, and transition. Each piece is executed in reverse, a form of “blind painting” in which the surface cannot be seen while it is being made, producing spatial disorientation and contingency.
The Disconnect Paintings are constructed in paired panels whose foreground and background colours alternate, creating visual tension and echoing Janus’s dual gaze. The structures are further organised by invisible grids based on musical time signatures, generating a visual discord akin to counterpoint. Titles are drawn from songs reflecting themes of dislocation, alienation, and lost love, extending the rhythmic and emotional underpinnings.
Colour is deliberately limited to two tones per work, drawn from natural, fluorescent, and greyscale palettes. Painted on acrylic sheeting, the surfaces reflect their environment, mirroring viewers and surroundings, and creating a “colourised alternate world”—a threshold space aligned with Janus’s symbolism of passage and transformation.
Across his practice, Hogan investigates the interplay of poetic impulse and ordered systems, producing works in which structure and flux, clarity and disruption, coexist. Nevermore and The Disconnect Paintings invite viewers to experience art as a dynamic negotiation between visible form, invisible forces, and temporal rhythm.
Melbourne-born Sean Hogan (b. 1972) studied Art and Design at Swinburne TAFE before completing a Bachelor of Graphic Design at Swinburne University. He has exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne Now, 2022–2023), La Trobe Art Institute, and at art fairs including Spring 1883 and Sydney Contemporary. His work is held in major collections including the NGV and Artbank, and he has received recognition through national awards such as the Australian Book Design Award and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects Award.
