Masaaki Noda: FROM FORM TO FORCE

GOCA by Garde presents FROM FORM TO FORCE, a solo exhibition by Masaaki Noda, on view at the gallery's Chelsea space from October 8 through November 5, 2026. Centered on new cast stainless steel sculptures and paintings made for this occasion, the exhibition surveys a career of nearly half a century that began with printmaking in the 1970s. It is one of the few large-scale gallery presentations in New York in recent years by the artist — awarded the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour by the Hellenic Republic in 2023 — and his first solo exhibition with GOCA by Garde.

The exhibition's title, FROM FORM TO FORCE, names a single movement that runs through the artist's work. Its point of departure is the rigorous construction of geometric form. In the 1970s silkscreen series Expression, Noda developed a method of layering multiple color printings so that form sinks into, and resurfaces from, strata of color. After he moved to the United States in 1977, that form ceased to be still and began to move. In the watercolor Gravity (1981), lines of force cut across the picture plane and draw the form along with them; by Forefront (1994), form has come to enact collision and counterpoise among multiple layers. The new works in this exhibition stand at the far end of that process, in which form gives way to the description of force.

Sculpture is the physical consequence of that movement. Having tested the relationship between light and color in the stained glass Rising to the Firmament (1997) at Keihan Uji Station, Noda adopted mirror-finished stainless steel as his principal material from the 2000s onward. Through a collaboration of more than a quarter century with a metalworking factory in Osaka, taking measurements repeatedly at every stage of fabrication, he established a method for determining the precise angles at which a curved surface takes in the surrounding sky and architecture.

His public sculptures are permanently installed in cities across Japan, Greece, China, Mongolia, and the United States, among them Perpetual Flight VI: The Rising to the Firmament (2003, stainless steel, 3.5 m high) at the Shenzhen Art Museum, China; Apollo's Mirror (2005, 3.8 m high) at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi; The Spirit of Hermes (2010, 5 m high), installed at the Marathon stadium to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon; The Spirit of Hermae (2009, 4m high), The American College of Greece, Athens, Greece; Lafcadio Hearn: Odyssey of an Open Mind (2014, 2.2m high) in Lefkada, Greece; and Eternity: Resting Place of Lafcadio Hearn (2019, 2.8m high) at the Koizumi Yakumo Memorial Park in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The sequence of sculptures devoted to Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) constitutes a thirty-year response to a writer who moved between the two cultures of Greece and Japan.

The new works presented here are sculptures cast in stainless steel. Casting makes possible complex interior spaces that forging could not achieve: the mirrored surface not only draws in the surrounding light, but light reflected again and again within the intricate interior raises the inside of the work itself into a space of its own. Shown alongside them, the paintings of the Evolution and Spiral Interaction series build up translucent layers of color, unfolding on a two-dimensional surface the same principle as the sculptures — making energy visible through light and space.

Having come to the United States in 1977 to study at the Art Students League, Noda has worked in New York for close to fifty years, making him one of the very few Japanese-born artists to have watched this city's art scene transform at first hand over so long a span. This exhibition presents where that career stands today, together with new work.