Hiromichi Yamagata (b. 1948) Japanese/American, Limited Edition Color Lithograph. Depicts a brightly beautiful and busy street scene. Title: "Hotel Concorde." 1978. Pencil signed bottom right. Pencil numbered VIII/C (8/100) bottom left. Original gallery label taped to back. 

Overall: 37 1/4 X 32 1/4 in. 

Sight: 27 1/2 X 22 1/2 in. 

Depth: 2 in. 

#3831 . 

Hiromichi Yamagata was born on May 30th, 1948 in Maihara, Shiga Prefecture in Japan. The third child of five siblings, his father ran a lumber business in the difficult post-War years. While at high school between 1964 and 1967 he began exploring art and the use of pinpointed light in exhibiting, and won several awards. He left school in 1967 to become a student of Masachika Sugimura before moving to Tokyo, where he worked part-time at an artist’s material shop and later as an illustrator and a designer for an advertising company. He established JIM with Yuhji Itsumi, Youichi Sai, and Takeshi Shino in Shibuya in 1972, but agreed to move to Milan that same year to live with a girlfriend. When the relationship ended he decided to move to Paris and stayed there for the next six years. His first solo exhibition was held in Wien in 1973, and most of his works in the mid 1970s were paintings in water and oil colors. He became fascinated with Jazz and organized several events to promote and explore the musical idiom. In 1974 his first major installation work using lasers was shown at a theater in Paris. In 1978 Yamagata moved to Los Angeles, California and started to use bright silkscreen colors in his work. He has been based there ever since, building a reputation not only for silkscreen innovations but for being a  pioneer in the use of laser and hologram technology in the art world and beyond. He produced work for the Air & Space Bicentennial of 1983, the 1984 Olympics, the hundredth memorial anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, and the Australia Foundation Memorial and the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the Eiffel Tower, both in 1988. His official portrait of President Ronald Reagan and a series of work about golf in collaboration with Jack Nicklaus garnered him significant attention throughout the United States. He published a book of his work in 1987, the same year he established the Yamagata Foundation and collaborated with the Kennedy Foundation to hold a charity event for physically disadvantaged people. He donated all sales of his piece, “Fireworks,” to the International Red Cross Society for victims’ relief of the San Francisco earthquake. An exhibition of his work toured Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Fukuoka, Japan throughout 1989. A second book of the artist’s work, titled Yamagata, was published in 1990. His contributions to both the Barcelona and Atlanta Olympics in the 1990s solidified his reputation in the avant-garde as well as mainstream art communities. He became interested in film around the same time, and made a documentary about the Beat Generation with the poet Allen Ginsberg, who convinced Yamagata to give fellow poet Gregory Corso a monthly stipend to keep him comfortable for the remainder of his life. By the 2000s he was going simply by the name “Hiro,” and his laser work was instantly recognizable throughout the celebrity art world. His large-scale permanent holographic installations can be found all across the globe, and he has been honored by several countries and organizations including NASA for both his scientific and artistic contributions to humanity.