?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
SADAO HASEGAWA (1945-1999)
Untitled. Pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, gold leaf, glitter, and appropriated ink stamp on textured wove paper. 235x324 mm; 9 1/4x12 3/4 inches. Signed with the artist's ink stamp, lower right recto. Circa 1990.
Published in Sadao Hasegawa, the artist's first posthumous book, published by Baron Books, United Kingdon, 2022.
Provenance: Private collection, Tokyo.
Hasegawa was a master of homoerotic fetish art, often within fantastical and mystical settings, featuring Indian, Thai, Tibetan Buddhist, African, Japanese, and Balinese elements influenced by his extensive travels.
Now recognized as one of the most influential creators of homoerotic art in Japan and throughout the global queer community, Hasegawa's reputation was fairly confined during his lifetime. He was prolific during his short life but commercially limited by his own refusal to distribute his work outside of Japan. His suicide at the age of 54 shocked the art world and his influence might have narrowed even further when his family was prepared to destroy his remaining paintings. But a note he left near his portrait of an earlier queer Japanese writer and victim of suicide, Yukio Mishima, requested that the work he left behind be entrusted to Gallery Naruyama in Tokyo, who currently holds the majority of his collected works.
