Lot 33: NAOTO NAKAGAWA

NAOTO NAKAGAWA B. 1944 ICON signed, titled and dated 1966 on the reverse; signed, titled and dated 1966 on the stretcher enamel and acrylic on canvas 20 by 18 in. 50.8 by 45.7 cm

New York, White Box, Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted, Naoto Nakagawa 1965 -1975, March 2007, pp. 24-25, illustrated in color

Acquired directly from the artist

Naoto Nakagawa arrived in New York from Japan in 1962 and quickly became a feature of the downtown scene. He brought his own vision to the world of Pop Art which was exploding around him. Sometimes painting parts of his body before attending a downtown party, or participating in performance pieces, Nakagawa's work of the early New York period fused the cerebral and the primal, the real and the hallucinatory. With a nod to the surreal, he created a series of unique works which captured the rebellious attitude of the young painters of the day:

"To contradict Sigmund Freud's admission that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, in Nakagawa's paintings a pencil is never just a pencil; a pair of pliers never just pliers. Furthermore, to reverse the metaphor, a penis is never just a penis either. What could a penis stand for? Danger, nature, fatherhood, America?" John Perreault, "Naoto Nakagawa's Early Work: Objects Gone Wild", White Box, New York, 2007, p. 11

With Icon, the artist seems to literally cut himself off from his past, while at the same time surging forward to the future. The work has been recognized as a turning point which would lead to the massive scale and brilliantly colored works of the 1970s and 1980s.