Naoto Nakagawa 2026 Is on View at KAPOW
The Lower East Side gallery presents new works by an artist who has shown in major US museums since the 1960s. The exhibition is open through February 22.
Naoto Nakagawa’s current show at KAPOW brings together a significant group of new acrylic paintings and intimate watercolors, situating his recent practice within both the Japanese shunga tradition of erotic art and his own six-decade exploration of perception, material culture, and the natural world.
On view at KAPOW in Manhattan’s Lower East Side through February 22, works across the exhibition resonate with themes that have defined Nakagawa’s career since the 1960s — most notably his persistent pairing of man-made objects with organic life. Earlier bodies of work often approached this relationship from a cosmic or metaphysical scale, situating the Earth as one element within a vast, unknowable universe. Here, that perspective shifts decisively toward the local and the immediate. In his work, New York City — its streets, signs, and corners — becomes the site where philosophical concerns are lived out in miniature. A key painting, “Canal Street” (2025), encapsulates this turn. A lizard consumes a street crossing sign, a quintessential marker of Manhattan’s commercial geography.
Encounters unfold among pencils, toothpaste tubes, wine openers, or fragments of urban detritus in his shunga works, collapsing distinctions between desire, labor, consumption, and daily ritual. In Nakagawa’s hands, sexuality is not isolated from the world but embedded within it, echoing traditional shunga’s refusal to separate the erotic from the everyday.
The shunga paintings and watercolors, such as “Still Life With Wine Opener, Lemon, and Pomegranate” (2025), “Tom & Colgate” (2025), and “Pencil War” (2025), further underscore Nakagawa’s enduring fascination with the charged relationship between objects and bodies. These compositions echo still life and realist investigations from his earlier career while introducing an increased intimacy and looseness of touch.
Nakagawa’s paintings have been exhibited internationally, including shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, the Guggenheim Museum, and SFMOMA. His work is in the collections of MoMA, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, and the National Museums of Modern Art in Osaka and Kyoto.
For more information, visit kapowgallery.com.
