Justin Caguiat’s interdisciplinary practice spans traditional and time-based mediums, from expansive paintings to sculpture and installation, sound works, film and video, and printmaking.

Caguiat's numinous, dreamlike paintings depict realms beyond the visible. Figures and other lifeforms stir and recede into aqueous grounds of patterned color, which appear to overspill the bounds of unstretched sheets of linen or canvas. His work’s layered atmospherics reflect the Symbolist inheritance of fin-de-siècle eccentrics like Odilon Redon, who also turned to sources of enchantment and mystery in an era of rampant capitalism. Though unmistakably contemporary, his paintings draw on a mix of aesthetic traditions, from Vuillard’s wallpapered interiors to the Vienna School’s jewel-box modernism, to the flattened forms of Japanese woodblock prints, mosaics and Manga imagery.

Caguiat’s immersive work also extends through time and appeals to the viewer’s senses. Experiments with heat-activated pigments treat painting’s innate capacity to change before our eyes, undergoing slow shifts in color as the room’s temperature rises and falls. Duration and an attunement to surrounding conditions also govern his works in sound, which range from DIY directional speakers to bespoke copper bells that score one’s sense of space. Caguiat’s films share his paintings’ occulted narratives that create their own reality, through inner landscapes that drift between the observed and the imagined.

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Justin Caguiat was born in Tokyo in 1989. A solo presentation of his work, Zodiac Machine, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and organized by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, will travel to the Serpentine Gallery in London in fall of 2026. His work will also be featured in a two-person exhibition at CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, opening June 10. Recent solo exhibitions include Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown (2024); Greene Naftali, New York (2022); The Warehouse, Dallas (2022); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2021); Modern Art, London (2023, 2020); and 15 Orient, New York (2018). Significant group shows include Greene Naftali, New York (2023); Modern Art, London (2023, 2021); Lomex, New York hosted by Arcadia Missa, London (2020); and Clima, Milan (2019). Caguiat is a published poet and has participated in various readings and performances, including in 2017 at the Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.