Search results for ""Author Dakin Hart""

Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern brings together more than eighty works, from six decades, which reveal how the ancient world shaped this inspirational artist s vision for the future. Monolithic basalt sculptures and floating Akari ceiling lights are juxaposed with works that use stone, water, and light to call to mind elemental structures in civilization across time. Noguchi saw himself as equal parts artist and engineer and this volume devotes special attention to his patented designs, such as Radio Nursethe first baby monitor, and also includes his designs for stage sets, playgrounds, and utilitarian articles, many of which are still being produced today. "

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It starts with a simple idea: massive cubes of clay, half a meter high. The sculptures of Mexican artist Bosco Sodi (*1970 in Mexico City), cubes of fired clay stacked in high columns, ought to have exploded while being fired due to the extreme heat released in the material: sand, earth, and water. The richly illustrated publication on Sodi’s Clay Cubes explores the course of his experiment. He worked for several months creating the cubes, from compounding the material through layering and forming to drying and firing them in a kiln built especially for this purpose. Piled up to columns in the exhibition, they resemble the proportions of the human body and at the same time create an architecture reduced to the essential. Each cube bears the traces of the work process, following Sodi’s typical approach: the process of trying out and arriving as a result whose appearance he may influence, but not foresee.

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In May 1950 Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) returned to Japan for his first visit in 20 years. He was, Noguchi said, seeking models for evolving the relationship between sculpture and society—having emerged from the war years with a profound desire to reorient his work “toward some purposeful social end.” The artist Saburo Hasegawa (1906–57) was a key figure for Noguchi during this period, making introductions to Japanese artists, philosophies, and material culture. Hasegawa, who had mingled with the European avant-garde during time spent as a painter in Paris in the 1930s, was, like Noguchi, seeking an artistic hybridity. By the time Hasegawa and Noguchi met, both had been thinking deeply about the balance between tradition and modernity, and indigenous and foreign influences, in the development of traditional cultures for some time. The predicate of their intense friendship was a thorough exploration of traditional Japanese culture within the context of seeking what Noguchi termed “an innocent synthesis” that “must rise from the embers of the past.” Changing and Unchanging Things is an account of how their joint exploration of traditional Japanese culture influenced their contemporary and subsequent work. The 40 masterpieces in the exhibition—by turns elegiac, assured, ambivalent, anguished, euphoric, and resigned—are organized into the major overlapping subjects of their attention: the landscapes of Japan, the abstracted human figure, the fragmentation of matter in the atomic age, and Japan’s traditional art forms. Published in association with The Noguchi Museum. Exhibition dates: Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan: January 12–March 21, 2019 The Noguchi Museum, New York: May 1–July 14, 2019 Asian Art Museum, San Francisco: September 27–December 8, 2019

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