Akari Cloud: Installation view, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum (2018-19).
Photo: Nicholas Knight © The Noguchi Museum / ARS
Noguchi yet remained a sculptor first and foremost throughout his life. He considered the stone sculptures he created in his final years to be representative examples of his life’s work.
The son of a Japanese father and American mother, Noguchi constructed a profound sculptural philosophy while grappling with his identity as an artist. What continually inspired him on his path as an artist for over a half-century were Japanese traditions. His contact with Kyoto’s karesansui (“dry landscape”) gardens and tea ceremony aesthetics, for example, enabled him to grasp “what sculpture can do.”
This exhibition traces the “ways of discovery” leading to the stone sculptures of Isamu Noguchi’s final years, endeavoring thus to reveal the essence of his art. This it does through varied works from throughout Noguchi’s career, placed in three distinctive gallery spaces suited to the sculptor’s view of space as a continuation of his sculpture.
The works by Isamu Noguchi in this exhibition have a power to show what we, ourselves, so earnestly seek today.
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Organized by Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum operated by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, The Asahi Shimbun, NHK, NHK Promotions Inc.
With the Sponsorship of Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Corporation
With the Special Cooperation of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York,
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation of Japan, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, Japan
With the Cooperation of Ibaraki Broadcast System, JAPAN AIRLINES