Shinagawa was born in 1908 under the name of Takumi Sekino. He graduated from the Department of Metal Arts at Tokyo Metropolitan Kogei School. In 1935, while working at a printing company, Shinagawa started to study with the print artist Koshiro Onchi and learned woodblock printing along with more experimental techniques such as photogram. He joined the Japan Print Association in 1947 and the Kokugakai Association in 1949 and from 1952 onwards participated in various international print exhibitions. Apart of prints, he also created mobiles and three-dimensional works from everyday objects like spoons, aiming for a new experimental approach.

The fact that Shinagawa regularly went far beyond the boundaries of conventional print making has been strikingly demonstrated in the 1996 exhibition “Media and Expression: The Techniques of Contemporary Art in the Works of Takumi Shinagawa and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi” at the Nerima Art Museum. In 2008, the retrospective “Takumi Shinagawa: Commemorating his 100th Birthday” opened in the same venue. Shinagawa passed away in 2009. His elder brother was Tsutomu Shinagawa of the Perikan publishing company.