Justin Caguiat

Justin Caguiat was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1989. Accounts of his early life describe a childhood spent across Yokohama, Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Manila before he moved to North America, which explains why some later profiles have loosely associated him with the Philippines rather than Japan. He is reported to have studied art at Central Saint Martins in London and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, though no specific degree or graduation year is publicly documented. Before his painting career gained momentum, he is reported to have published a collection of poetry, A Rat, a Dog, a Boy, in 2017, and he has continued to work as a poet alongside his visual practice.

Caguiat's paintings are typically large, made on unstretched canvas or linen, and built up in oil, gouache, chalk, and distemper into dense, layered, almost kaleidoscopic surfaces that move between abstraction and figuration. His practice extends beyond painting into sculpture, installation, sound, film, video, and printmaking. He had an early solo exhibition at 15 Orient in New York in 2018, followed by shows at Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, The Warehouse in Dallas, Greene Naftali in New York, and Modern Art in London. He now lives and works between New York and Oakland, California. As of mid-2026, all available gallery, museum, and press sources describe him as an active, living artist with exhibitions planned into late 2026, and no obituary or death notice exists.

No named critic's exact wording could be confirmed for reproduction here, but the shape of Caguiat's critical reception is visible in the institutions that have taken him up. His inclusion in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, MCA Chicago, MOCA Los Angeles, SFMOMA, the Hessel Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art within a few years of his first solo exhibitions signals unusually early institutional confidence. That trajectory culminates in Zodiac Machine, a solo presentation organized by Fundacion Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, traveling to the Serpentine Gallery in London in the fall of 2026, alongside a two-person exhibition opening in 2026 at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco. Commercial gallery texts and market commentary consistently frame his paintings as immersive and atmospheric, built from densely worked, unstretched surfaces, though a fuller critical literature has not yet caught up with the pace of his museum and market attention.

Caguiat's auction history is short but has climbed quickly. His current record is USD 1,092,200 for The saint is never busy, sold at Sotheby's New York in 2024 (the exact sale date is not confirmed in available public sources). That sale surpassed his prior auction high of roughly USD 787,400, reported by Artprice and HENI, though the specific work and exact sale date behind that earlier figure are not confirmed in available sources. Other results point in the same direction: Doll 3 Eros (2020) sold for USD 504,000 against a USD 380,000 to 450,000 estimate in a Phillips New York evening sale. Taken together, these are the results of a market with only a handful of public transactions dating to around 2022, so each new sale still carries outsized weight in shaping his price history.

Caguiat's auction record is real but thin: it rests on a small number of sales concentrated in the last few years, so any single result, high or low, can move the picture significantly. There is no catalogue raisonne, and his art education, reported as time at Central Saint Martins and California College of the Arts, is not confirmed to have produced a specific degree, which puts extra weight on verification through his representing galleries, Modern Art in London and Greene Naftali in New York. His museum presence is unusually deep for an artist at this stage of a career, which is the strongest signal of long-term institutional support, but collectors should treat his auction pricing as still being established rather than as a settled trend line.