Koichi Sato (b. 1974, Tokyo) has lived in New York since the late 1990s and works from a studio in Chinatown. Trained in graphic design and film but not in painting, he began drawing in his thirties, with the painter Tomoo Gokita as a mentor along the way. He paints group portraits, mostly of American archetypes found in old magazines: wrestlers, bodybuilders, cheerleaders, astronauts, preachers, police officers, sitcom casts, sports players with enormous moustaches. The faces are square and disproportionate, grinning hard, the bodies exaggerated, and the patterned backgrounds push everyone forward into a single flat plane, the flatness of a magazine page. He works in acrylic and oil with a debt to sumi-e ink technique, lets his hand run, and the paintings are meant to be funny without laughing at anyone.
Solo exhibitions include Eight Days a Week at The Hole, New York, Living in America
