Momoko Nakagawa

*1996, Japan

Momoko Nakagawa was born in 1996 in Japan and lives in Shiga Prefecture. Since 2015 she has worked at the well-known Atelier Yamanami in Japan, which was founded in 1986 and is open 24 hours a day for anyone with physical disabilities or psychiatric issues who wants to come. Here they can work creatively with no pressure or formal requirements. The main theme of Momoko Nakagawa’s artwork is her own name, Momoko. While stereotypes and repeated behaviours in her day-to-day life are not very welcome, they find expression and appreciation in her artwork. An example of this are her “Circle Drawings”, characterised by multiple lines overlapping each other in such a way that they develop into an abstract form that goes beyond the original form of the individual elements. In the exhibition catalogue “japon brut. la lune, le soleil, yamanami” (christian berst art brut, 2019), an article by Raphaël König entitled “Atelier Yamanami: Collective Endeavor, Individual Creation” describes Nakagawa’s artistic style as “lyrical abstraction” (page 51). Momoko Nakagawa works on paper using markers, ballpoint pens or stamps.

In 2019 Momoko Nakagawa was awarded the “Art Absolument Prize for Outsider Art” at the Outsider Art Fair (OAF) in Paris. As curator for this prize, which in 2019 focused for the first time on women, I (Hannah Rieger) was invited to select a shortlist of ten living female artists. A key requirement was that their work was on display at the fair by one of the around 40 participating galleries. An independent jury then selected the two winners: Momoko Nakagawa (Yukiko Koide Presents, Tokyo) and Susan Te Kahurangi King (Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York). Momoko Nakagawa is represented by Yukiko Koide Presents in Tokyo and by christian berst art brut in Paris. Works by Nakagawa were shown in several exhibitions in Paris in 2019: in “japon brut. la lune, le soleil, yamanami” at Christian Berst’s gallery, and on his stand at the “Galeristes” fair in Le Carreau du Temple, then at OAF 2019 as part of the Art Absolument Prize, and finally in the Art Absolument gallery. Her works can also be found in collections such as that of Antoine Frerot in France.

Selected works