Kouichi Sato

Koichi Sato was born in Tokyo in 1974. He moved to New York in 1999, at the age of 25, where he taught himself to paint while working as a corporate graphic designer. It was in the mid-2010s that he commenced his career as an artist, having been discovered by the late Bill Brady (Bill Brady Gallery). Since then, he has held solo exhibitions at Bill Brady Gallery (Miami, USA), The Hole (NY, USA), Jack Hanley Gallery (NY, USA) and others, also taking part in the group exhibition “Tokyo Pop Underground” (Jeffery Deitch, LA, USA, 2019) curated by NANZUKA. Sato cites old American magazines from the 1970s and 1980s as his preferred image source. From professional wrestlers to baseball players, cheerleaders, bodybuilders, bands, astronauts, and ordinary people, there is no set subject for Sato’s paintings, only choices that arise naturally from his own interests. Although these unconditionally cheerful characters are at once somewhat nostalgic, they present the impression of being strangely disconnected from specifications such as time, place, race, ideology, and culture. This is indeed significantly related to Sato’s unpretentious, down-to-earth personality, as an artist who expresses a desire to be “more mindlessly absorbed in the act of painting.”