works
bio
works
bio
Kazuhiro Toyama was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1994, and now works and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He received his degree from Musashino Art University in Tokyo, specializing in metalwork. Toyama is a recipient of various prestigious awards from institutions such as the Silver Triennial in Germany and Forbes Japan 30 Under 30. He was a finalist for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2024.
Toyama’s works are rooted in the appreciation for the beauty of the natural world and an emulation of the cyclicality of life. His material, metal, is the source of his inspiration. He is fascinated by the multiplicity of metal as inorganic matter, yet foundational for organic beings, from an essential element in their bodies to the buildings they make. Metal becomes malleable in his hands, transformed into sculptures of texture and movement yet substantial in presence, channeling the very elemental nature of his material focused practice. He enriches his color palette of earth tones and shades of blue with the incorporation of gold and silver as well.
He effortlessly melds art with science in his technically experimental work as he utilizes the differences in melting points and melting behaviors between various alloys and compounds with his thermal spraying techniques to create the distinctive effects in his striking sculptures. He repurposes thermal spraying, which is originally an industrial technology that creates a coating layer by spraying fine particles of molten metal or ceramic material onto the surface of a metal for the purpose of rust proofing and surface hardening.
On the essence of his practice, Kazuhiro Toyama says:
“By completely melting metals ‒ materials considered to be the quintessential inorganic substances, but also elemental building blocks of the Earth ‒ and then reconstructing them into forms that express the originally formless elements of the Earth and the beauty of life, I attempt to represent the cycle that takes place on Earth. I am moved by the way that cold, hard metal can be broken down and then reworked into warm, organic forms. This act seems to me to be no different from the circulation of energy and the cycle of life, like the sea turning into the atmosphere and the body returning to the soil.”