Sawako Goda
at Nonaka-Hill

by | Mar 11, 2025

This exhibition features paintings, sketches, and ephemera from the estate of Sawako Goda (1940-2016). Goda’s oil paintings immerse the viewer into a strange urban sea in which the body merges with gems the size of appendages. Goda’s “story of the eye” shifted when she encountered the Eye of the Horus, an Egyptian symbol in which the eye is made of six parts, each corresponding to the anatomic location of a particular human sensorium. Moving between New York City, Tokyo, and Cairo, Goda refigured the Hollywood femme fatale and “vamp” as new creatures under or alongside glass: these women appear to be blissfully alone and entranced, completely unaware of the viewer. Rodney Nonaka-Hill first discovered Goda through her poster art from the 60s and 70s; this show beautifully showcases both the ephemeral and the monumental aspects of Goda’s corpus.

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