Sawako Goda

Born in 1940 in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan, the artist Sawako Goda traversed, in the first half of her life, many aspects of Japan’s inventive postwar avant-gardes. Precocious, she gained early attention in the mid-1960s for junk assemblages of materials collected on still-war-damaged streets.

In 1971, Sawako Goda lived in New York City for a year with her then-partner, Tomio Miki—an “Obsessional Artist” - and at a pivotal moment. On returning to Japan, she began painting with oils, drawing inspiration from old magazines and photographs found in a New York antique shop, and from a precious book, the Museum of Modern Art’s catalogue of E. J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits, which depicted prostitutes in early 20th century New Orleans. Decadent, faded, surreal, seedy glamor became her central preoccupation. She painted prolifically, made illustrations for magazines and advertisements, and, over the course of the 1970s, designed stage sets and posters for underground theater troupes, including Jūrō Kara’s Jōkyō Gekijo (Situation Theater), and Tenjō Sajiki (Top Floor Gallery), a troupe led by the avant-garde poet and dramatist Shūji Terayama.

If her work stood out for its Western preoccupations—surreal portraits of film icons Marlene Dietrich and Veronica Lake, tributes to Lou Reed and Marcel Duchamp’s femme alter-ego Rrose Sélavy—she was nevertheless woven tightly throughout this period into a rich community of forward-thinking artists and was showing her work regularly. In the mid-1980s, however, she became increasingly obsessed with a different fantasia, that of ancient Egypt. After a visit to Cairo with her two daughters in 1978, she decided to relocate her family there in 1985. The move proved less than permanent.  They returned to Japan after just a year. Yet the encounter with Egypt provoked a dramatic transformation in her life and her practice became increasingly visionary and abstract.

Public Collection:

The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan, Mitaka City Gallery of Art, Mitaka, Japan, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.