505 West 19th Street | New York, NY

  • HFZ Capital
  • Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth
  • Kyotaro Hakamata

For this project, Art Assets was hired by HFZ Capital Properties to curate an art program for the marketing office of HFZ’s new residential property, 505 West 19th Street.

The selected artists offered a modern, sophisticated point of view that reflected the decor and tenancy of 505 W19.

About the Artists

Kyotaro Hakamata says: “In terms of the logical process involved in making sculpture, which gets its whole shape via the integration of parts, my work, in its piling up of variously colored acrylic boards and shaping them, is made via the orthodox method. However, the stripes of the surface created by such a process deform and delude viewers’ visions when they try to see the shape of the work. Probably no one can perceive the exact form of the sculpture. So here, you can see the contradictory relationship: The consequence of the basic process of making sculpture destroys the viewers’ visions. In addition, each acrylic board is really well made. It can be likened to a ‘mass of color’ that might confuse the concepts of color and shape. The colors of these stripes on the surface are supported by a dense and solid materiality, in other words, by the very concept of the sculptural.”

Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth: “Eyes as Big as Plates” is an ongoing collaborative venture between Riitta Ikonen (Finland) and Karoline Hjorth (Norway), in which they photograph senior citizens in “costumes” made of natural materials that the artist duo craft on the spot. Ikonen and Hjorth met during an artist residency in Sandnes, Norway in May 2011, where the first part of the series was produced in collaboration with local senior heroes, sailors, retired agronomes, and 90-year-old parachuters. The project was exhibited for the first time in Sandnes in May, before being presented at Pecha Kucha in Oslo in September. In January-February 2012, the series was shown at the Finnish-Norwegian Culture Institute in Oslo, and NRKís Nasjonalgalleriet (national television) ran a program about the project, featuring the artists on a shoot in the swamps of Oslo.