Izumi Kato's Fishing Habit Runs Through Perrotin New York

Izumi Kato's solo exhibition at Perrotin New York opened on October 28, 2026, with a reception that evening from 5 to 8 PM. The Japanese artist, born in 1969 in Shimane, fills the gallery with oil on canvas, cast aluminum, plastic models, fabric and wood, and fish and coral run through the exhibition, which Perrotin ties to his lifelong passion for fishing.

Five Materials, One Painter's Habits

Perrotin lists the materials in the show as oil on canvas, cast aluminum, plastic models, fabric and wood. Five materials is a wide range for one room, and the gallery's own description explains why it holds together: Kato "brings a painterly sensibility" to his sculptures, thinking about color, surface and form the way he does on a canvas.

Casting is where that claim gets tested. A sculpture in cast aluminum is a copy of a model, so any painterly surface on it comes from a second pass of paint, and a plastic model arrives with a factory finish the artist has to answer. Putting both in one exhibition shows how many surfaces one eye is asked to govern.

The gallery announced the body of work as suspended and freestanding sculptures alongside paintings on canvases of varying sizes, all realized between 2025 and 2026. It centers on the humanoid figures Kato calls hitogata. The installation views credited to photographer Guillaume Ziccarelli show works that all carry the same title, Untitled: three dated 2026 and one dated 2025.

Fish and Coral Come From the Fishing Rod

Aquatic imagery runs through the exhibition, including fish and coral, and Perrotin ties it directly to the artist's lifelong passion for fishing. The reference is personal and specific: the gallery presents the fish and coral as coming from the artist's own life near water, not from a borrowed symbol.

The gallery frames the result as work that challenges conventional notions of scale and composition. A suspended sculpture and a floor standing figure ask a viewer to move differently than a wall of canvases does, and the paintings of varying sizes keep that shifting pace going. Kato's lithographs do the opposite and shrink the idea to a sheet: Untitled A and Untitled B, a set of colored lithographs, are available at Perrotinstore in New York and online.

Three Days Later, Washington

Kato's Perrotin opening arrives three days before a second piece of news. Perrotin says the exhibition coincides with a monumental work for the Hirshhorn Museum's Sculpture Garden in Washington, which reopens on October 31 after Hiroshi Sugimoto's redesign. Coverage of the museum's announcement lists Kato among eight artists with first acquisitions for the redesigned garden, so the museum and the gallery use different words, commission and acquisition, for the same moment.

The garden piece is titled Untitled and dated 2026. It is a figure made from stones sourced in Japan, cast in aluminum and painted, and it draws on an ancient myth that understands natural elements as inhabited by spirits. Cast aluminum appears in both places, so the Washington piece and the New York show share a material.

Perrotin's Japanese Lineup Keeps Growing This Year

Perrotin has put Japanese artists at the center of its American programming before this season. Takashi Murakami opened 24 new ukiyo e paintings at Perrotin Los Angeles on February 14, 2026, a show that ran through March 14 and traced how Japanese woodblock prints fed European Impressionism. Kato arrives eight months later in New York with a different argument: Murakami built his show around art history, and Kato builds his around a fishing habit and a sculpting one.

The gallery's Paris program is running in parallel. Panorama at Perrotin Matignon, a group exhibition with a special focus on Jeppe Hein and Josh Sperling, stays on view through January 16, 2027. With Kato on view in New York and Panorama on view in Paris at the same moment, the gallery has two cities running at once.

Dates for the Kato show matter for anyone planning a visit. Listings put the New York run at October 28 through December 19, 2026, which gives the exhibition roughly seven weeks. The Hirshhorn reopening on October 31 falls in its first week, so a viewer can see the gallery presentation and the garden piece within days of each other.