Nonaka-Hill is proud to announce the representation of Sawako Goda (b. 1940 - d. 2016), a complex artist celebrated by the Japanese avant-garde during her remarkable 50 year career, yet virtually unknown in the United States. 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. Decadent, faded, surreal, seedy glamor became her central preoccupation over the course of the 1970s. She painted prolifically, made illustrations for magazines and advertisements, and designed stage sets and posters for underground theater troupes, including Jūrō Kara’s Jokyo 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—surrealist portraits of film icons Marlene Dietrich and Veronica Lake, tributes to Reed and Marcel Duchamp’s femme alter-ego Rrose Sélavy—she was nevertheless throughout this period woven tightly into a rich community of forward-thinking [Japanese] artists and was showing her work regularly. In the mid-1980s, however, this weave began, slowly then suddenly, to fray. She became increasingly obsessed with a different fantasia, that of ancient Egypt.