Mieko Meguro

Works, New York, 2009-2026 is a two-decade survey of the New York-based Japanese artist Mieko Meguro’s work, which embraces painting, sculpture, textiles, installation, and artist’s books. A recurring thread in her work explores her everyday life with her husband the artist Dan Graham (1942-2022.) Seen together, Meguro’s project is a profoundly moving meditation on love, life and loss.

A central thread running throughout Meguro’s work is her creative and romantic relationship with the artist Dan Graham (1942-2022). Writing in 2022 about the motivation to make Dan a subject of her work, Meguro said:

One day I was reading a Japanese art magazine that mentioned that Dan was “one of the most difficult artists of our time.” I was shocked. There was no effort to understand Dan. That was one of the reasons I started to make drawings of Dan. I wanted to express to the world that Dan was not just a difficult man. He is a genius, and also kind, generous, handsome, an amazing creature. There are so many books about Dan’s work but Dan’s personal, charming side is not in the books. Therefore, I want to express Dan’s interesting personality with my mischievous hands. (From “My Life With Dan”, Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, 2022.)

At White Columns, Meguro’s ongoing series of paintings and hand-embroidered pillow-sculptures depict scenes from her everyday life with her partner – e.g., him asleep in hotel rooms, watching TV, writing, and looking for his glasses. Recording Dan’s daily routines – eating, cleaning his teeth, or searching for a vinyl record – has become the subject of Meguro’s disarmingly charming, comic-like artist’s books. Meguro’s first artist’s book Condiments (2009) – the thirty-four original drawings for which are presented in the exhibition – was commissioned and published by Dan. Meguro has self-published four new artist’s books on the occasion of the White Columns exhibition.

Meguro mines her private life for her work, making it public. This threshold – the tensions between the private and public realms – was also a central concern of Dan’s work. As viewers and readers, we become privy to both the specificity of the couple’s shared intimacy and to more universal ideas about companionship, caretaking and loss. In the poignant Bigelow Wrappers, 2015-2021, Meguro poetically re-stages the wrappers from the many prescriptions she would collect and administer for her husband, which she subsequently singed with Japanese incense. The suspended, cloud-like accumulation of inside-out potato chip bags that comprise Exhausted Helium, 2016-2017 are saved and repurposed from the many bags that Meguro had nervously eaten during her visits to see Dan in the hospital over the course of many months. Since her husband’s passing, Meguro continues to explore her life and their relationship: her 2025 text work ‘A Solo Life’, presented as a concertina-like drawing, is a profound meditation on the nature of grief.

Elsewhere in the exhibition Meguro presents works from the series Molotov Cocktails, 2026- , empty alcohol bottles with gesso-painted wire “flames”; Icy Hearts, 2010-2026, heart-shaped forms made from gesso-painted Japanese barbed wire; Love Letter Blank, 2023-2024, the wire muselets from Champagne bottles embedded into sheets of raw paper pulp; and Xavier Hearts, 2009 – present, an extraordinary accumulation of hand cut-and-sewn red felt hearts named after Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552) who as a representative of the Portuguese Empire led the first Christian mission to Japan. (The Church of Saint Francis Xavier is located on 16th Street in New York’s Flatiron District.) Two recent series of small-scale, votive-like paintings of candles and flowers gently amplify the persistent memento mori-like qualities that underscore Meguro’s approach to both art and life.

Mieko Meguro (b. Hokkaido, Japan) lives and works in New York. She is the founder and director of 3A Gallery located in New York’s Chinatown. www.3agallery.com Between 1990 and 2009 she showed her earlier work extensively in Japan. Since moving to New York in 2009, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at: Galleryonetwentyeight, New York (2025); Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto, Portugal (2025); Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, Portugal (2022); Librairie Marian Goodman, Paris (2020); Shoot The Lobster, New York (2017); Greene Naftali, New York (2016); and Asia House, London (2016), among others. Her work has been included in numerous group shows including those at: Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2023); Magenta Plains, New York (2021); Schirin Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2020); Carriage Trade, New York (2019); and at White Columns in 2016 in ‘Looking Back: The 10th White Columns Annual’, curated by White Columns’ director Matthew Higgs; among many others.