Salon Art + Design

Nove 4 - 8, 2026

Onishi Gallery at Salon Art + Design
Onishi Gallery Returns to Salon Art + Design with an Intimate Collector’s Interior

Onishi Gallery is pleased to return to Salon Art + Design, taking place November 4–8 at the historic Park Avenue Armory.

Entitled Crafted Dialogues: Art and Design in Conversation, Onishi Gallery’s presentation for Salon Art + Design 2026 has been reimagined by Guillaume Coutheillas, founder of frenchCALIFORNIA, as an intimate collector’s interior, bringing contemporary Japanese craft into dialogue with works by artists from New York, Italy, and Korea.
The booth embodies the cultural dialogue at the heart of Coutheillas’s practice. Born in Paris, he combines French refinement with an American sense of openness and a cosmopolitan curiosity about objects from across the world. His interiors forge connections across cultures, periods, and disciplines, allowing each piece to retain its identity while contributing to a larger narrative.

Alongside wall works by sculptor Jeffrey Maron, portraitist Agostino Rocco, and mixed-media artist Ran Hwang, the Onishi Gallery booth will present a wide range of Japanese KOGEI: a distinctive category defined by exceptional craftsmanship, a profound engagement with material, and the reinvention of centuries-old traditions in contemporary form. The featured artists work in lacquer, clay, and metal.
Osumi Yukie, Flower Vessel “Naruto”, 2024

Among the exhibition's standout artists is metalwork specialist Ōsumi Yukie (b. 1945), a Living National Treasure renowned for elegant vessel forms created through an exacting hammering process and enriched with delicate applications of metal leaf. Suggesting wind, clouds, and the movement of water, her luminous surfaces transform traditional metalworking into objects of striking contemporary beauty.
In lacquer, Onihira Keiji addresses contemporary subjects while retaining the classical language of gold powders,

shell inlay, and polished surfaces. Noguchi Ken’s sculptural forms, by contrast, evoke the movement and depth of the sea.

In ceramic art, Kaneshige Kōsuke’s subtle humor reimagines ancient kiln traditions, Konno Tomoko’s biomorphic forms exploit the tension between attraction and apprehension, and Ōhi Toshio Chōzaemon XI’s work in stoneware evokes the primordial forces of the earth.
In metalwork, Rusu Aki wields her blowtorch to create sculptural works in iron shaped by elemental processes of transformation, while Living National Treasure Ōsumi Yukie uses gold and lead overlays to imbue her silver vessels with an extraordinary sense of softness.

Also featured will be a selection of contemporary ceramics from the Setouchi region of western Honshu, Japan's main island. Okano Genroku creates functional and sculptural works in the Bizen ware tradition, celebrated for its chance effects, rough textures, and visible traces of the maker's hand. Kuroi Hiroshi combines the thin-walled, elegant heritage of Mushiage ware with extensive use of modern polychrome and iron glazes.
The From the Sea series by Kaneshige Kōsuke (b. 1943), which reimagines the ancient Bizen stoneware tradition through sculptural invention and subtle humor, provided the inspiration for the exhibition's title.
Conceived as a space of encounter and discovery, Crafted Dialogues: Art and Design in Conversation celebrates the connections that emerge when diverse traditions, materials, and perspectives converge, revealing craft's unique capacity to bridge cultures, histories, and disciplines.

Onishi’s Gallery own exhibition Across the Sea, held in celebration of our twentieth anniversary and bringing together ten of Japan's most accomplished KOGEI practitioners, will be on view at our Upper East Side premises through December 22.