Arakawa was an important leader of Japan’s neo-Dada movement around 1960, but moved in 1961 from Tokyo to New York, where he now lives. His work is characterized by its flat geometrical surfaces and by delicate combinations of various kinds of signs, including words, phrases, sentences, numbers, arrows, straight and curved lines, circles, and so on.

For this exhibition, Arakawa created a series of six acrylics, titled “The Desire of the Diagram,” 1986, which he dedicated to Shuzo Takiguchi. Takiguchi, who died in 1979 at the time of Arakawa’s last major retrospective in Japan, was a friend of