Jacob Hashimoto | Woodblock Kite Proofing Session
B. 1973, GREELY, COLORADO
Jacob Hashimoto uses sculpture, painting, and installation to create complex worlds from a range of modular components: bamboo-and-paper kites, model boats, even Astroturf-covered blocks. His accretive, layered compositions reference video games, virtual environments, and cosmology, while also remaining deeply rooted in art-historical traditions—notably, landscape-based abstraction, modernism, and handcraft.
Hashimoto has been collaborating with Durham Press since 2015, producing editions and monoprints featuring intaglio, woodblock, and screenprint. His prints often reference his kite works, reflecting on and reimagining aspects of his process—from the blueprint-like imagery of Lemmata (2015), to the nearly two hundred individual kite images in The Hashimoto Index (2018), to the playful compositions of The Necessary Invention of the Mind (2020).
Represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Studio la Città, Verona, Italy; Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki; Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland; and Ronchini Gallery, London, Hashimoto has been exhibiting internationally since the late 1990s. In addition to numerous solo shows at the aforementioned galleries, he has been the focus of individual presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1998); Tacoma Art Museum, Washington (2004); San Jose Museum of Art, California (2004); Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2007, 2009, 2011, and 2016), MACRO—Museo d’Ate Contemporanea di Roma, Rome (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2014); SITE Santa Fe (2018–19); and Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas (2018–19). He has produced site-specific installations for locations ranging from Governor’s Island in New York to Willis Tower in Chicago.
Hashimoto’s work is in private and public collections internationally, including the those of Cornell Tech, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Microsoft Corporation; Schauwerk, Sindelfingen, Germany; Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation; Tacoma Art Museum, Washington; University of Chicago; and the U.S. Department of State.