Fireworks Group Show Part 2
THE FRIDGE
1O1 East 75th Street
New York NY 10021
The Fridge at 101 East 75th NYC Grand Opening
Inaugural Group Show
FIREWORKS
Pt2: October 29th to November 21st, 2026
The Fridge is delighted to present FIREWORKS, the inaugural exhibition at its new space at 101 East 75th Street, New York.
Presented in two parts, FIREWORKS brings together artists based in Japan and New York, working across painting, works on paper, textiles, and ceramics. The exhibition features both ongoing collaborators of The Fridge and two artists presenting their work with the gallery for the first time.
With FIREWORKS, The Fridge continues its commitment to introducing emerging voices from Japan to a wider international audience, while creating a dialogue with distinctive local talents and previously unseen works from New York.
Install ------------------
Biographies ------------
Katsu Naito
Katsu Naito [Winner of the 2023 Rema Hort Mann Foundation emerging artist grant.] Japanese photographer and artist Katsu Naito (b.1964 Tokyo, JP) embarked on his photographic journey in his early twenties soon after he moved to New York City. Driven by the desire to capture emotions on film and paper, Naito began his career by photographing his fellow New Yorkers in the streets during the 1980s and meticulously developing his films in his own lab, ensuring a careful and precise quality to his print. Throughout his career, he has striven to capture or create moments of connection in his work, representing his surrounding environment in an organic and simple manner. Naito views photography as an incredible medium for preserving the emotions and the raw feelings for posterity, imbuing his images with a timeless quality. Some of his photographs of Harlem were featured in the 2017 book Once in Harlem, which sold out instantly and is highly sought after by photography aficionados. In 2019, Vogue US commissioned and published his portraits of Japanese American women who survived internment during World War II, alongside their descendants.
Taku Obata
Taku Obata was born in 1980 in Saitama, Japan. He graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2006, where he went on to complete his MFA in Sculpture in 2008. Rooted in his background in B-boying (breakdancing), Obata’s artistic practice explores the relationship between the human body, movement, space, and gravity. Through his distinctive approach to wood sculpture, he captures the energy, tension, and physicality of the body in motion, transforming fleeting gestures into sculptural forms. In recent years, Obata has expanded his practice to include painting, drawing, photography, and video. Moving fluidly between two- and three-dimensional media, he continues to challenge the conventions of each medium he engages with, exploring new ways of representing movement, volume, and the body’s relationship to space.
Andre Walker
Andre Walker, a London-born, New York-raised Designer, Creative Director, and Artist, has built a distinguished career in fashion design, and mixed media art. Renowned for his purist vision, he crafts hypnotic dreamscapes through mesmerizing sketches and watercolors, blending modernism with boldness and ethereality. Discovered in his teens by legendary street photographer Bill Cunningham, Andre was featured in publications such as The New York Times and Details Magazine, alongside Azzedine Alaia and Thierry Mugler. He later became a regular mention in The Andy Warhol Diaries. A recipient of the prestigious ANDAM prize and an Honorary Doctorate from the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco, Andre has always followed an unconventional path. Rejecting the rigid fashion calendar, he embraces a selective, authentic approach, earning the admiration of industry icons like Rei Kawakubo, Kim Jones, and Virgil Abloh. His notable collaborations include Comme des Garçons, Dover Street Market, Yves Salomon, Louis Vuitton, and Marc Jacobs. His exhibitions, such as The Casual Pleasure of Disappointment at Thaddaeus Ropac and Non Existent Patterns at the Louvre, highlight his artistic depth. Andre continues to make waves, appearing in Bottega Veneta’s S/S 20 campaign and TEN MEN magazine. His latest works were showcased in the multimedia installation Studio Visit Exhibition (February 2024), The Summer Wall at The Fridge (July 2024), and The Group Show at Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach (December 2024). In 2025 Andre Walker was awarded the prestigious Isabel Toledo Board of Directors’ Tribute from the The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).
Joji Nakamura
Born in 1974, Joji Nakamura currently lives and works in Yokohama, Japan. Joji Nakamura paints with his hands using acrylic, gesso, graphite and ink on canvas. His extruded faces are instantly recognizable. Nakamura’s dynamic strokes transform into his own rendition of a classic portrait, a figure painting or a surreal landscape created with his body. He has held exhibitions in Paris, the Netherlands, Taiwan and Japan. In recent years, Nakamura added colors to the monotone repertoire paintings of his early years, presenting portraits and still life pieces in soft blotchy hues. Past shows include Kaplan Projects in Mallorca, Peter Augustus gallery in Dallas, Zierher Smith in Nashville, Galerie Mikiko Fabiani in Paris and Scooters For Peace in Tokyo.
Kazuma Koike
Born in 1980 and lives in Osaka, Japan. Koike spent his childhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, attended high school in Barcelona, Spain, and graduated from the Department of Sculpture, College of Art at Nihon University in Tokyo. The works of Spanish sculptor Josép Clarà has inspired him to follow suit. Growing up in a multi-cultural environment, Koike is interested in “Shinbutsu-Shugo”, a mix between Japan's native Shinto beliefs and Chinese Buddhism. Koike visited numerous temples where their architecture, gardens, and sculptures became his inspiration. Koike started his first attempt of deconstructionism sculpture by compiling various dismantled found objects, removing their physical meaning, and reforming them into a sculpture. In the recent decade, Koike created most artworks by mixing images from different space and time, creating “fictional ancient artifacts” as if they do not belong to any era of the recorded history. Motifs of divinity, big cats, plants and pineapples repeatedly appears in Koike’s works, such as the tiger paintings of Japan's Edo period, there was no tiger in Japan at that time. Tiger paintings then were imaginary creatures made with reference to chinese paintings, furs brought back and cats. Koike always aims at the state where “different elements coexist in harmony”. He once joked that future scholars from 2000 years later will discover a whole new culture from his buried works. The artist attempts to present his works as if they were found objects, hence his creations are mostly spontaneous. Black clay and special black glaze are applied to simulate the color of traditional Japanese tea sets. Most of Koike’s sculptures are titled in codes “BC” stands for “Black Clay”, and numbers are the date finished modeling - Koike avoids any narrative in the work titles, so that one could interpret his work from a more detached perspective purely on the basis of its physical form. Koike's notable recent shows include Cadet Capela (Paris, 2023), OMURO MUSEUM (Mie, 2021), two-person Shows at Aishonanzuka Gallery with Jordy Kerwick (Hong Kong, 2024), and with Djordje Ozbolt (Hong Kong, 2023), as well as HAGD Contemporary with Henrik Godsk (Aalborg, 2023).
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