Overlooked Minimalist Ralph Iwamoto Is Back in the Frame of New York Abstraction

Before Sol Lewitt became a household name, he was a guard at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). So was Ralph Iwamoto. In the late 1950s, the museum’s staff included a cluster of artists who would go on to become stars: Lewitt, Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman. Iwamoto was right there with them, sharing ideas and steadily building a visual language of his own. And yet, while their names were canonized, his slipped from public view.

That has started to change. In recent years, Iwamoto’s story has begun to reach wider audiences. Now, a new exhibition at Hollis Taggart, “Octagonal Permutations,” spotlights two decades of work, particularly his focus on the octagon—a geometric form the artist returned to obsessively in his later life, taking inspiration from the layout of Manhattan. It follows “Wild Growth,” the gallery’s 2023 presentation of Iwamoto’s surrealistic paintings from the 1950s. Together, the two shows represent the most sustained curatorial effort to date to bring Iwamoto from the margins of American abstraction to firmly within its frame.

As attention returns to Iwamoto’s work, what surprises many—especially those encountering him for the first time—is how sharply it contrasts with the man himself. “He was a very nice guy, really casual about his work and things in general,” said curator Jeffrey Wechsler, who first brought Iwamoto’s work to the gallery’s attention. “Which was amazing, because his art didn’t look like it came from the same person. He was so relaxed and laughing, and his work was so precise.”

Iwamoto’s paintings reflect this acute attention to detail—precise, composed, and often rigorously structured—but never cold. Even at his most methodical, Iwamoto retained a sense of play with color and form.

Born in Honolulu in 1927 to Japanese Buddhist parents, Iwamoto was a teenager when he witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team—the all–Japanese American unit that became the most decorated in World War II—before moving to New York in 1948. He was thrown into the center of New York’s avant-garde, studying under Vaclav Vytlacil and Byron Browne.

By 1955, Iwamoto was already being featured in prominent group exhibitions, including his first show at Rugina Gallery, alongside Alfred Leslie and Louise Nevelson. His inclusion in a 1958 group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art marked his formal entry into the New York art scene.

Iwamoto’s first work depicted surreal ecosystems. Tropical vegetation transformed into animal anatomy; sea creatures morphed into blossoms; roots and ribs became interchangeable. These works, grounded in his Hawaiian upbringing and a Japanese decorative sensibility, reflect what Wechsler called “a natural surrealism coming out of his imagination and his background.”

One striking example is Rain Forest Images( (1955), a painting that stages a surreal masquerade of vegetal and animal hybrids with vivid blue, acid orange, and pale lavender. In these floating forms—lush, saturated, and strange—Iwamoto was already pointing toward the dualities that would later define his practice: structure and looseness, logic and improvisation, emotion and distance. “You can see this throughout most of his work—even the very rigid, geometric ones,” Wechsler said.

By the 1960s, Iwamoto had transitioned to a more streamlined visual language, characterized by geometric abstraction, often on handmade, shaped canvases. Associated with the Minimalists at MoMA and in New York’s art scene, his work veered away from the biomorphic forms into rigid geometries. Iwamoto turned to the city grid, and these latticed forms appear in much of his first purely abstract work.

“Being fascinated with the city of New York, and marveling at the towering architecture, Iwamoto found his own way of distilling the tall skyscrapers and office buildings into geometric abstract grids, symbolic of the city itself,” said New York gallerist Hollis Taggart.

Still, unlike many of his Minimalist peers, he never fully abandoned the emotional nuance of his early work in favor of strictly formal work.

“Iwamoto was not a pure minimalist,” Weschler explained. “[He] was never like that. He was always more complex internally.” Even his most reduced compositions carried a quiet tension. The mood shifts with palette, with spacing, with slight variations in form. “He saw these possibilities of making something more complex,” Wechsler said. “Even just black, white, and blue—it’s gorgeous.”

The vast majority of Iwamoto’s paintings from the 1970s onward revolve around a single geometric form: the octagon. Over the next two decades, he worked on a series to explore the octagon through systematic groupings: “QuarOctagons” featured four shapes per canvas, “Octagon Concepts” used eight, and “Factors” expanded to 16. Each iteration allowed Iwamoto to test new arrangements and chromatic contrasts, revealing how slight shifts in form and color generated entirely different visual harmonies.

“He spent every day working these formulas out…almost scientific in the way he approached it,” said Taggart. An early example is Red Blue Move (4 Octagons) (1970), on view in New York, which features a red field punctuated at the corners by blue and ivory octagonal edges. It’s a bold example of Iwamoto’s early use of color.

Throughout the ’70s, Iwamoto titled paintings after New York City squares—Foley, Herald, and Abingdon, the latter of which was next to the Westbeth artist residency in Chelsea, where he lived. Iwamoto was increasingly influenced by the grid-like architecture and infrastructure of Manhattan, once crediting the “razzle dazzle of Times Square” as an inspiration.

These compositions became increasingly complex over time. In the plotted grid of Dominoes Opus 27 (1987), each tile holds a different octagonal variation—stacked, spliced, staggered.