COITUS INTERRUPTUS
Key Hiraga · Takuro Kuwata · Jonathan Trayte · Tim Fluck
Opening 8 October 2026
8 October - 20 November 2026
Siegfried Contemporary, London
A pink form lies across “Mr H.”’s lap; a mirror-bright body splits open to expose its rough interior; neon lines rise, bend and abruptly change course. In the group exhibition Coitus Interruptus at Siegfried Contemporary, interruption becomes a productive principle: not a failure, but the moment in which desire or form departs from its expected path. Bringing together 25 works by Key Hiraga, Takuro Kuwata, Jonathan Trayte and Tim Fluck, the exhibition spans almost sixty years, from 1967 to works made specifically for the exhibition in 2026.
Its historical centre is a group of five works by Japanese artist Key Hiraga (1936–2000) dating from 1967 to 1971, the decisive years in which his distinctive psychosexual universe took shape. As a young man in Tokyo, Hiraga had already encountered the city’s pleasure culture while working in a tattoo parlour in Asakusa. After moving to Paris in 1965, however, a more permissive sexual climate and the nightlife he observed there pushed his painting in a new direction: largely monochromatic, calligraphic works gave way to intense colour, pattern and fragmented erotic bodies. “Mr H.”, the recurring protagonist of these pictures, has been described as Hiraga’s own double. Bodies splinter into eyes, mouths and sexual organs; scale and gender become unstable, while pleasure repeatedly tips into embarrassment, loss of control and dark humour.
Hiraga’s international significance was recognised early. He was included in the MoMa’s travelling exhibition The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture and represented Japan at the 10th São Paulo Biennial in 1969. His singular position between Japanese post-war art and European figuration has attracted renewed attention in recent years.
In “The Elegant Life of Mr. H.” (1970), the frontal protagonist holds an elongated pink form across his lap, hovering somewhere between limb, phallus, prop and obstacle. In “The Elegant Life of Mr. K.” (1971), lip-covered forms part like curtains around a compressed figure, while stripes and chequerboards suggest depth only to frustrate it. Hiraga repeatedly offers the eye recognition, then withdraws it.
It is from this instability that Coitus Interruptus takes its point of departure. Hiraga is not presented simply as a historical reference, but as an active interlocutor. British artists Jonathan Trayte and Tim Fluck have made new works for the exhibition in direct response to aspects of his visual language. Stripes leave the painted surface and become sculptural structures; tubular forms reappear as neon or porcelain; motifs once contained within Hiraga’s bodies acquire physical volume.
Jonathan Trayte has long explored the psychology of desire and the ways in which objects are made seductive. His new works move between body, landscape and consumer object. In “Baby Doll” (2026), pink forms and light assemble into an almost human presence, suspended between organism and illuminated product. Elsewhere, fruit acquires electrical fittings and plants become neon drawings. Hiraga’s erotic instability is rerouted through a contemporary culture of consumption and manufactured appetite.
For British ceramic artist Tim Fluck, the connection is more structural. New works from his Pleasure Perceptions and Totem series assemble individual porcelain elements into playful, precarious bodies. Hiraga’s black-and-white stripes and abrupt shifts of colour reappear as a three-dimensional grammar. As the youngest artist in the exhibition, Fluck also introduces a practice still in the process of defining its vocabulary into direct conversation with an established historical position.
Japanese artist Takuro Kuwata introduces another form of interruption: one generated by the material itself. Kuwata has radically expanded the language of the traditional tea bowl through intense colour, precious metals and firing processes in which rupture becomes generative rather than corrective. In “Untitled” (2016), a reflective platinum surface splits apart to reveal a rough, stone-like core. In “Peach” (2025), hard bronze assumes the appearance of soft fruit, its central crease slipping almost imperceptibly into bodily and erotic association.
“I wanted to take Hiraga as a point of departure rather than build a historical exhibition around him. What interests me is the moment when an image or a desire stops behaving as expected. Hiraga’s work combines eroticism with an extraordinary sense of humour, yet it can be seductive and deeply unsettling at the same time. Bringing it into contact with works being made now allows that energy to remain in motion. For me, interruption is not an ending; it is often where another possibility begins.”
— Andreas Siegfried, founder of Siegfried Contemporary
This dialogue across generations is characteristic of the programme developed by Swiss curator and art adviser Andreas Siegfried, who founded Siegfried Contemporary and opened its London exhibition space in 2012. His exhibitions have consistently brought historical and contemporary positions into close proximity, often allowing affinities of form and material to cut across conventional categories.
Coitus Interruptus therefore proposes no simple history of influence. Instead, it asks what happens when images made more than half a century ago encounter objects being made now. Bodies become patterns, vessels split open and lines reverse direction; forms repeatedly refuse the identity we have just assigned to them.
The interruption is not where the journey ends. It is where another one begins.
With loans from Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, for works by Key Hiraga, and Alison Jacques, London, for works by Takuro Kuwata.
Siegfried Contemporary
16 Bassett Road
London W10 6JJ