SEIZAN Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Kiyoshi Hamada (b. 1937, Kōchi, Japan), surveying five decades of work from 1975 to the present. Trained at Tama Art University and active since the early 1960s, Hamada has pursued a singular question: not what to depict, but how the painting itself — support, material, and the traces of the hand — comes into being. 

The exhibition opens with the red-line plywood paintings of the mid-1970s, inspired by the dawn horizon over the Pacific coast of his childhood. They are followed by the DRAWING series, begun in the 1980s, in which Hamada turned the elemental, labor-intensive act of drawing graphite on paper into a meditation on accumulated time — filling sheets and rolls of paper with countless pencil strokes until the surface transformed into a dense, lustrous black substance, no longer image but sheer matter and duration. In the 2000s, Hamada began another body of work of layering, scratching, and carving paint to unearth buried strata of color. The exhibition also includes his latest works of ink on paper.

In 2025, Hamada was the subject of a major retrospective, Kiyoshi Hamada: Journey — 1975 and onward, at The Museum of Art, Kochi, in his native prefecture, surveying a half century of his practice. His works are held in major collections including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.