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White Cube Bermondsey is pleased to present A New Nature, an exhibition of works by Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), conceived in collaboration with The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.
The exhibition takes its title from a talk Noguchi gave to students at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970 where he urged them to forge ‘a new nature’ from the materials of urbanization and technology they encountered around them. Bringing together several bodies of work that reflect the artist’s attempts to promote consciousness of a broader understanding of nature, the works on show employ industrial methods and materials yet appeal to our awareness of what is organic.
In 1955, the architect Robert Carson approached Noguchi about repurposing an unrealized design for a bank lobby in Texas for a new office building across the street from the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Noguchi agreed to re-conceive what was initially a wall relief as a ceiling sculpture, on the condition that he could also make a waterfall. With undulating, wave-like arrangements of aluminum and stainless steel, Ceiling and Waterfall, 666 Fifth Avenue (1956–57) transformed what was a severe, modernist space of black and white marble into an imaginary landscape and a buffer from urban noise—a sea of clouds and the sound of falling water.
In the intervening years, several renovations compromised the context of the work, and in 2020 these installations were permanently removed from the building and their components were donated to The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum by the owner without restriction. Learn more about Ceiling and Waterfall, 666 Fifth Avenue in this digital feature.
Noguchi’s Akari lanterns, or light sculptures, epitomize his efforts to expand the concept, potential and purpose of sculpture. Useful, affordable, easily stored and shipped, their qualities are antithetical to our preconceived notions of sculpture. They encapsulate his interest in iterating upon old traditions, his consideration of heritage and the ways in which these crafts can be pushed into the future, as well as an openness to new technologies. Weightless and uplifting, their metaphorical and actual lightness and natural life-giving warmth offer, as he said, “a foil to our harsh, mechanized existence.”
Octetra is a modular geometric play system Noguchi developed in the 1960s. Formulated from his friend R. Buckminster Fuller’s theories about the fundamental structures of natural forms—each element is a truncated tetrahedron—they can be endlessly reconfigured. Though the earliest examples, for a playground in Japan (1965–66) and the plaza in front of Spoleto Cathedral in Italy (1968) were made in concrete, the five configurations here are made of Fiberglas, a material Noguchi wanted to use but was not yet available to him.
Late in life, through experimenting with the Japanese crafts of kirigami and origami (Japanese cut and folded paper) and industrial sheet metal manufacture, Noguchi produced a series of twenty-six galvanised steel sculpture editions with Gemini G.E.L. The sculptures represent a virtual retrospective of the artist’s wide-ranging visual vocabulary—landscapes, bodies, abstract spatial concepts and natural forces—and offer a bridge between the natural and the manmade. Process-driven, playful, and oriented towards an increasingly urban environment, they are archetypal late works by this great artist.
Another installation, in the 9 x 9 x 9 gallery, takes its inspiration from Noguchi’s ideas for simple terracing for playgrounds, as well as indirectly from Heaven (Tengoku), 1977–78, a complex step-pyramid environment he designed for the atrium of Sogetsu Kaikan, Tokyo. Here, an interactive series of terraces developed from one of his models for that unrealized playground sits below a small cloud-form presentation of Akari lights, a transformative space that encourages both physical and perceptual interaction. This is an homage to the artist’s desire to extend sculpture to total environments.
Learn more at whitecube.com.
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