Artwork Details
- Artist Hiroyuki Masuyama
- Title The Lost Works of Caspar David Friedrich
- Date 2007-2008
- Medium Series of 5 light boxes
- Credit Commissioned and produced by Sharjah Art Foundation
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For Sharjah Biennial 9, Hiroyuki Masuyama recreated a series of lost paintings by 19th century German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.
Combining photography and extreme digital image editing, Masuyama works directly with multiple photographs (sometimes numbering in the hundreds, or even thousands) to form a composite final image, mirroring a painter's method of working from multiple sketches.
Through this process he reproduces works of landscape art from the past. These images are presented on large-scale light boxes to emphasise their distance from the original in terms of time and medium, while maintaining continuity in terms of content.
In this series, Masuyama has meticulously recreated the lost landscape paintings, by travelling to locations similar to those in Friedrich's original works.
The work of Hiroyuki Masuyama pays homage to the great nineteenth century landscape artists, reflecting the interrelation between time, space and medium in a distinct and compelling way.