Gallery of Contemporary Art (GOCA) by Garde is pleased to present Generations: Ushio Shinohara, Noriko Shinohara, and Alex Kukai Shinohara, featuring paintings and sculptures by Ushio Shinohara (b. 1932, Tokyo), Noriko Shinohara (b. 1953, Takaoka City), and their son, Alex Kukai Shinohara (b. 1974, New York). Generations will be the family’s first New York exhibition together since 2014 and their first collaboration with GOCA by Garde, coinciding with the gallery’s one-year anniversary. Opening January 8, 2026, the exhibition will be on view through February 19, 2026, at GOCA in Chelsea. An opening reception will be held on January 8, 2026, 6:00 – 9:00 pm. For more information, please visit goca.gallery.
From their home and studio in DUMBO, and an artist loft in SoHo before that, the Shinoharas each maintain distinct artistic practices alongside one another. Over the course of many decades, the family has coexisted in their shared commitment to pursuing art, forging a unique and sometimes tumultuous dynamic that informs their work. While they make art as individuals, with widely varied interests and processes, their lives together are united by an irrepressible need to create.
Ushio Shinohara has long been an enfant terrible of avant-garde circles, first in postwar Japan as part of the Neo-Dada Organizers, and then in the postmodern scene of New York from 1969 on. He is best known for his “Boxing Paintings”, an ongoing series of action paintings made by punching an unstretched canvas with sponge-covered boxing gloves coated in sumi-e ink. The newest work from this seminal series, entitled Autumn Sunshine (2025), was made specially by the 93-year old artist for Generations on the occasion of GOCA’s 1st anniversary; the distinctive marks on the canvas serve as a record of the motion, energy, and intensity of Ushio’s singular performance. This moment of action—not the resulting painting—is the true work of art, according to the artist himself. Complementing this body of work are a selection of sculptures that exemplify his forceful, energetic style, inspired by the tireless vim and vigor of city life and his experiences coming up as an artist in 1970s New York City.
Noriko Shinohara arrived in New York in 1972 as an art student and quickly became entwined with Ushio; her semi-autobiographical series “Cutie and Bullie”, first developed in the early aughts, charts her contentious 50+ year relationship with Ushio in the style of a graphic novel. In new and recent works, Noriko expands the character of “Cutie” to include fantastical scenes of her world, as envisioned by the artist. “Cutie’s Love at the Time of Corona : Last Year in Parisby Teleport” (2021) arose from a pandemic-era longing for the travel and freedom that the Shinohara family enjoyed before lockdown. Painted in rich tones of Hokusai blue, the mosaic-tiled floor of Capella Palatina in Sicily transforms into the cobblestone streets of Paris,leading the eye to a family of geese–one of the artist’s favorite animals in her neighborhood. In “Aurora---or Fjord---?” (2025), a different cobblestone street—that of the Shinoharas’ home and studio in Dumbo—is backlit with swirling forms of the aurora borealis that enthralled Noriko on a previous trip to Norway.
Ushio and Noriko’s first and only child, Alex Shinohara, has evolved as an independent artist while embracing elements of both his parents’ practices: the textual annotations and figuration of his mother’s work, and his father’s penchant for turning discarded scraps of cardboard into mixed-media sculpture. Alex’s sculptural work bears the patina of urban detritus, incorporating found materials such as used cardboard, electrical wires, industrial plastics, and newspapers, and referencing skateboards, motorcycles, and other symbols of speed, industrialization, and consumerism. Embracing the grit and pace of his upbringing in the art scene of 1980s New York City, Alex’s 2-D creations employ a neon palette and energetic, gestural brushstrokes, such as in two works on view from 2017. His expressive figures often unfold as a narrative of repeated subjects in various arrangements, drawn from a wide array of sources and experiences in the city, and as part of a household that operates more like an artist collective than a nuclear family. From decades of prolific output by all three artists, Generations celebrates the life and work of the Shinohara family. Ushio, Noriko, and Alex Kukai Shinohara each draw from their individual and shared experiences in New York, Japan, and beyond, citing the importance of place from their respective practices while prioritizing the act of making above all. GOCA is proud to begin its second year of programming in Chelsea with Generations, foregrounding the work of remarkable contemporary artists from the Japanese diaspora.
About Ushio Shinohara
Ushio Shinohara is a painter and sculptor living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He is known for his “Boxing Paintings”, in which he attaches sponges to boxing gloves, saturates them with paint, and punches across large canvases to create action-filled compositions. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Shinohara is a central figure in postwar Japanese art. A founding member of the Neo-Dada Organizers, Ushio Shinohara embraced pop art as early as 1963 with his “Imitation Art” series, a critical take on the work of American pop artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Shinohara moved to New York in 1969, where he began creating figurative works, including his series of cardboard sculptures of motorcycles. In 1991, Shinohara revived his “Boxing Paintings” series and has continued creating these dynamic works in both public and private settings. His work has been featured in institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and the Japan Society, New York.
About Noriko Shinohara
Noriko Shinohara is a contemporary painter and printmaker known for her distinctive visual language blending narrative, humor, and personal history. Born in Toyama Prefecture, Japan, Noriko Shinohara moved to New York in 1972 to study art. In 2003, she began developing her “Cutie and Bullie” series, which employs comic-style narratives and semi-autobiographical characters––“Cutie” as a stand-in for herself, and “Bullie” based on her husband, Ushio Shinohara––to explore their life together, including creative struggles and her self-autonomy. Her most recent work is a series of oil paintings that focus on her own experiences, surroundings, dreams, and personal interests. In 2003 and 2005, Noriko’s work appeared in the IPCNY “New Prints” exhibition. In 2007, she was included in the Japan Society Gallery’s exhibition “Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York”. Her work is held in numerous permanent collections, including that of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.
About Alex Kukai Shinohara
Alex Kukai Shinohara is a painter and sculptor whose work blends figurative and narrative elements with influences from street culture. Based in Brooklyn, he shares a Dumbo studio with his mother and father, Noriko and Ushio Shinohara, carrying forward the family’s dynamic artistic legacy alongside his own distinctive voice. He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1992 and has since actively exhibited his work in the United States and Japan. In 2009, he was included in “New Tale of Our Age”, co-curated by Midori Yoshimoto and Aileen Wang, who introduced ten emerging artists in the greater New York metropolitan area at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit.
