NEW SOLO EXHIBITION
Hiroko Ohno: Event Horizon

Galaxy: Event Horizon, 2018–2021 (diptych). Mineral pigments, seashells, mica, coral, salt, acrylic on linen. 96 × 152 inches.

Amos Eno Gallery

Hiroko Ohno
Event Horizon

On view October 15 to November 15, 2026

Opening Reception
Friday, October 16
6 – 8 p.m. R.S.V.P.

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Event Horizon, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptural elements by Japanese artist Hiroko Ohno. The work on view explores the invisible structures that connect cosmic formation, geological time, and human experience.

Humanity has entered a new era of seeing the universe. Recent advances in astronomy — including the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which produced the first images of a black hole — have revealed phenomena once thought impossible to observe. Rather than illustrating these scientific discoveries, Hiroko Ohno's Event Horizon responds to the questions they provoke, presenting paintings and sculptural elements that explore the invisible structures connecting cosmic formation, geological time, and human experience. Through painting and subtle spatial interventions, the exhibition invites viewers into a space where visible forms continually suggest deeper layers of matter, energy, and time.

This exhibition builds on an inquiry that has shaped Ohno's practice for more than three decades. Her fascination with the universe began not through scientific research but through direct experience: witnessing the setting sun and rising moon simultaneously across the horizon in Mongolia's Gobi Desert profoundly altered her perception of Earth as a planet suspended in space. During her first visit to New York, she met Minimalist artist Tadaaki Kuwayama, whose rigorous pursuit of reduction and spatial clarity encouraged her to further refine her own visual language. Since then, Ohno has developed an ongoing dialogue with astronomy, geology, and cosmology — not to explain scientific knowledge, but to explore enduring questions of existence, time, gravity, and humanity's place within a vastly larger continuum.

At the center of the exhibition is Galaxy: Event Horizon, a monumental two-canvas painting measuring 96 by 152 inches. Inspired by the Event Horizon Telescope project and its attempt to produce the first image of a black hole, the work developed from Ohno's long-standing investigations of gravity, spacetime, astronomical distance, and the relationship between the visible and invisible. Within its semicircular structure, astronomical distances are translated into proportional intervals, while curved lines evoke gravitational waves and the distortion of spacetime. Rather than illustrating scientific phenomena, the painting constructs a pictorial space in which different scales, forces, distances, and dimensions coexist.

Material itself is central to that investigation. Ohno works with traditional Japanese mineral pigments formed over millions and billions of years within the Earth. Some materials, including platinum, predate the formation of our planet, allowing the works to embody — not merely depict — deep geological and cosmic time. The paintings themselves reveal multiple temporal layers, with dark blue surfaces often concealing luminous fields of red beneath them, suggesting that every visible surface contains unseen histories and processes extending beyond immediate perception.

Drawn by questions raised through the Event Horizon Telescope project, Ohno traveled to Chile's Atacama Desert, where she visited the ALMA Observatory and painted the Milky Way beneath one of the darkest night skies on Earth. These firsthand observations became integral to the development of Galaxy: Event Horizon and reflect her commitment to direct experience in an increasingly mediated world.

By bringing together materials that embody billions of years of planetary and cosmic history with works shaped by direct observation and contemporary scientific discovery, Event Horizon creates a space where art and science meet through wonder rather than explanation. At a moment when astronomy continues to expand the limits of human perception, Ohno's work invites viewers to look beyond the visible world and to imagine their place within the universe. Seen from a cosmic perspective, humanity is no more than a tiny speck of dust. In the Anthropocene, her work encourages us to reconsider the value of all forms of existence — not only human life, but also animals, plants, rocks, fire, and the materials that have shared Earth's history for billions of years.

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Amos Eno Gallery 191 Henry St.
New York, NY 10002
347-670-3310
Wednesdays through Sundays, 12–6 PM

Milky Way, 2025
mineral pigment, lapis lazuli, azurite, seashells, coral, mica, acrylic, and salt on linen, 96 × 76 in

My first-panel discussion in New York.

Hiroko Ohno, Galaxy, 2021. Mixed Media on indigo ganpi paper mounted on wood panel, 35" x 25"

March 31, 2023 Review by - Stephen Gambello Arcade Project

The Review
All Featured Reviews

The subtle, monochromatic indication of a horizon in Hiroko Ohno's Galaxy reveals not one, but many, galaxies rising in communion. The personification of dignity, and the process of self-awareness, is presented in action here. The universe itself is finding order, and upright balance, at the guiding hands of the artist herself. It is a rebirth of all things, alerting us to that fact as the shape of a fetus can also be discerned among the starfield. Pregnant within the Universe's structure is the shape of a mind's will: the shape of Hiroko Ohno's Galaxy.

Instead of contemplating our external features endowed by the physical demands of nature, we contemplate the shape and composition of our thoughts, our musings, our transcendence. And in presenting the works of the various artists featured in OUTER ORBIT/OUT OF ORBIT, we see their very imagination manifest as the limitless, yet intimate, autobiography of the mind.

Galaxy I, 2023, mineral pigment, seashells, coral, mica, acrylic on linen, 20" x 16"

Drawing, Saturn/Jupiter, 2021, watercolor pencil on Fabriano Murillo Paper, 9" x 12"

Galaxy I, 2010, mineral pigment, platinum, bound by animal glue on natural paper mounted on wood panel, 35.75" x 25.75"

Installation view at Lichtundfire Gallery, New York, NY.

Outer Orbit/Out of Orbit - Group Show
Lichtundfire Gallery 175 Rivington Street, New York, NY. 10002 - On the Lower East Side
March 2 - April 1, 2023.

Galaxy-Event Horizon III, 2023, mineral pigment, seashells, mica, coral, Acrylic on linen, 40" x 30"

Installation view at Mibu, Ginza, Tokyo February 1-25, 2023

Galaxy - Event Horizon, 2018 / mineral pigment, lapis-lazuli, azurite, seashells, coral, mica, acrylic, salt on linen, 96" x 76"

Hiroko Ohno solo exhibition
Homma Museum of Art in Sakata city in northern Japan. January 12 - February 18
Artist talk January 12 at 2pm

Galaxy Around Us, 2017 / mineral pigments and acrylic on canvas board, wire, magnets / 33" H x 30" W x 19" D

Participating in Asia week - San Francisco, CA
Asia Week - San Francisco, CA October 5 - 14 2018

Galaxy, 2018 / mineral pigment on konshi paper mounted on wood panel / 36" x 26"

"An Ishigaki Island Hotel Stores a Hiroko Ohno Piece." Art Annual (Shinbijyutsu newspaper), September 1, 2018 issue

Galaxy, a piece by the New York-based artist Hiroko Ohno, has been stored inside the "Galaxy Room" at the Miyahara Hotel on Ishigaki Island, Okinawa. The room is situated in the Misaki Kan wing, which was opened in July. The Southern Cross is observable from the room from late December to near the end of July. It all started when Yasuhiro Miyahara, the hotel's CEO, saw Hiroko Ohno's work hung in an Ishigaki Island café. Ohno reflects: "Galaxy is an expression of myself. I gratefully and humbly accepted the commission." The striking array of stars depicted on the painting both entertains and puts guests at ease.

A telescope and a planetarium can also be found inside the Galaxy Room.