“Everything was sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I considered sculpture”.
So thought Isamu Noguchi and is something this comprehensive retrospective exhibition at the Barbican gallery aims to convey.
How do you compress a life’s work into a one-minute blog? I can’t so will just show a few photos of objects on display.
From the Spider dress and Serpent created for Martha Graham in Cave of the Heart through to his Akari paper lamps recognised all over the world, Noguchi was obsessed with how materials and form interact in space.
An artist skilled in traditional techniques, he earned his living making portrait heads whilst developing his ideas on abstraction.
His public work included playgrounds: brilliant for the interaction with sculpture from a young age and big in scale. I love the compactness and circularity of this slide, obviously influenced by Jantar Mantar.
The tenderness of Mitosis is for me, less about separation and more about connection: the kiss between parent and child.
