Keisuke Yamamoto

Keisuke Yamamoto (born 1961, Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese lithographer whose mature practice has been organized since the early 1990s around a single sustained title — 'Light, Time, Silence' — a series of monochrome stone lithographs that takes wooden chairs, staircases, doorways, and other quietly inhabited interior architecture as its principal subject. The series was begun in 1992 and is still ongoing, with the print numbering having advanced past thirty individual variations on the title; he also produces parallel series including 'Sea Breeze,' 'Nostalgic Scenery,' 'The Sunshine Filtering through Foliage,' and a body of standalone works depicting cloisters, staircases, and apple trees.

Yamamoto trained in oil painting rather than printmaking, completing a Master of Fine Arts in Oil Painting at Kanazawa College of Art and Crafts in 1986. He took up lithography afterwards through training at a Japanese print studio, and the discipline of working from stone — where the drawn marks cannot be revised once etched — has shaped the deliberate, planning-heavy character of his subsequent practice. He has stated that what he aims to render is not the depicted objects themselves but 'the air, time, and light surrounding them,' a phrase that captures the mood of his pictures' empty interiors and unoccupied chairs.

In the 1990s Yamamoto built a substantial early exhibition record: he received the Metropolitan Prize at the Miyako Print Award Exhibition in 1992 and the Grand Prize at the second Sapporo International Contemporary Print Biennial in 1993, and in 1995 he was awarded a Japanese Government overseas research fellowship to study in Rome. Across the decade he showed at one-person and group exhibitions in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, alongside group inclusions in international print biennials. His prints have entered institutional collections including the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center print archive.

The 'Light, Time, Silence' compositions are typically vertical or square monochrome lithographs rendered in soft greys and blacks on cream paper; the printed image often centres on a single domestic object — a wooden chair, a staircase landing, an arched cloister — set within an architectural frame that is rendered with the same careful tonal modelling. The cumulative effect is something close to a still photograph: the suggestion that the room had a person in it a moment ago, who might be coming back, but who is for now absent. The subjects across thirty-some prints in the series operate as variations on a small set of furniture types that Yamamoto returns to repeatedly.

In the United States Yamamoto is represented primarily by Davidson Galleries (now operating as Gallery No.85, Seattle), which carries his catalogue across the 'Light, Time, Silence' series and the parallel 'Sea Breeze,' 'Sunshine Filtering through Foliage,' and 'Nostalgic Scenery' bodies of work, with prices typically in the $400–$650 range and editions issued in the 30–50 print range. He is also documented through Hanganet (the Japanese print-knowledge-base) and has been written about in the contemporary architecture-photography online journal Socks Studio. He continues to live and work in Kyoto, where he maintains an atelier producing hand-drawn stone lithographs.