Masaaki Sato, Subway No. 30, 2025-26 Acrylic on canvas 46” x 58”
Masaaki Sato: New York Since 1970
Nov 19, 2026 - Jan 16, 2027
For more than fifty years, Masaaki Sato has been stopping, looking, and finding something unexpected in this city’s familiar sights. In his hands, a subway car, a rack of magazines, or an apple becomes an occasion for asking how we see and how we find our place among strangers.
Born in Kofu, Japan, in 1941, Sato studied in London before arriving in New York in 1970. Throughout his career, he has combined close observation with a mischievous impulse to disrupt what he sees. He knows the satisfaction of getting a detail right. He also knows the satisfaction of making that detail rebel. Across paintings, prints, and sculpture, Sato’s work invites recognition, then complicates it. We know what we are looking at until we look again.
In the Holes works, repeated conical openings interrupt bodies, vehicles, and the spaces of everyday life, making the solid vulnerable. In the Newsstands works, headlines, faces, and magazine titles become material for invention, as familiar lettering turns strange.
This retrospective follows those discoveries across a career and suggests a walk outside afterward: even the most ordinary corner may hold another surprise.
The exhibition will be on view from November 19, 2026 through January 16, 2027.
About the Artist
Masaaki Sato is a Japanese artist who lives in New York and depicts it. Born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1941, he left Japan in 1967 and traveled by way of London to New York, hoping to exhibit alongside pop artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. His Subway Series made a striking debut in 1970, when it appeared on the front page of The New York Times Sunday edition.
In the 1980s, he developed his signature Newsstand Series: hyperrealist paintings of the city’s newsstands, drawn in bold outline with altered magazine covers and mirrored text. Art historian Edward Lucie-Smith described the works as allegories of communication and artistic isolation. OK Harris Gallery, under Ivan C. Karp, represented Sato for three decades, and today he is recognized as a key figure bridging Japanese and American postwar visual culture. Learn more here.