Hiroshi Sato spent his childhood in Tanzania but returned to Japan for secondary school. His work has been featured in Visual Art Source and Juxtapoz Magazine. His work is in public collections including Cheekwood and Ionis Pharmaceuticals.

”Depicting our world in the present has become the domain of digital professions, photography and writing, which are increasingly hosted and function in a digital commercial space. Vast swaths of record and depiction exist only as digital objects. As a result, our world has potentially become less archival, less accurate, and less accessible for future generations. A physical painting, on the other hand, is unmediated and archival. It requires only yourself to see the image and can exist on its own.” With this premise, Sato posits that the purpose of contemporary painting today has a reemerging function: to preserve and depict “what it felt like” for humans living in our current time. His paintings are crafted to be instantaneously apparent and unmistakable as a painting made by a person expressing human experiences. This can only occur with a sincere observation of our current social and political times by a subjective observer.

Fed Worker is clear by its title and date of creation as to which event in history it is referencing. The apparent nature of the piece is also intended to be unambiguous in recalling the subtextual meaning to core tenet of “painting only what we can see,” something that has mainly fallen out of favor by contemporary realist painting.