NOGUCHI: A global citizen

Art for me is something which teaches human beings how to become more human.

An exhibition celebrating Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), one of the most experimental and pioneering artists of the 20th century.

Noguchi explores the kaleidoscopic career of a true artistic polymath. This exhibition, which is his first touring retrospective in Europe for 20 years, focuses on Noguchi as a global citizen and his risk-taking approach to sculpture as a living environment. 

Over the course of his six-decade career, the Japanese American artist used sculpture as his chosen medium for exploring the world. Working with a vast range of materials and across different cultural and artistic contexts, Noguchi continually expanded sculpture’s reach to encompass the total environment of our awareness. The diversity of his work, along with his refusal to affiliate with any style, movement, or neat categorisation, has made Noguchi a difficult artist to pin down historically. It is also one of his most profound contributions to artmaking and to human understanding. Noguchi modeled an artistic practice and life premised on a sense of openness, exploration, and play that transcended classification.

For him, reinventing tradition was a way of both honoring and transcending a specific history, relating instead to something universal and shared.

Noguchi exhibition on show now until 9 Jan 2022 at Barbican Centre
Get tickets here