Some twenty-five sculptures and ceremics and over thirty light sculptures by the American-Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) will be on view in and around the Rijksmuseum this summer. The 2025 edition of the Rijksmuseum’s annual outdoor exhibition will explore all aspects of Noguchi’s wide-ranging oeuvre. The artist is considered one of the most significant modernist sculptors of the 20th century.
The outdoor part of the exhibition, in the Rijksmuseum Gardens, presents mainly stone and bronze abstract sculptures by Noguchi. Inside the museum, 30 of the artist’s world-famous Akari light sculptures will decorate the Atrium. The Asian Pavilion will display a selection of his groundbreaking and often witty ceramic work, including the iconic 1952 piece Face Dish (Me). Noguchi’s rare chess table will be on view in the museum’s 18th-century Beuning Room – the artist originally made this work for the 1944–1945 exhibition The Imagery of Chess, which was organised in New York by the surrealist artists Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst.
Free entrance
Entrance is free to the outdoor part of Isamu Noguchi in the Rijksmuseum Gardens, which runs from 28 May to 26 October 2025. The exhibition has come about through a partnership between the Rijksmuseum and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York. It was made possible in part by the Don Quixote Foundation/Rijksmuseum Fund, Pon and the Rijksmuseum Club.
Milestone year
This exhibition takes place in a milestone year for The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York, as the institution celebrates its 40th anniversary. Through its ongoing programming, the Museum promotes creative exploration and reflection around the enduring legacy of Isamu Noguchi.
Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904. His father was Japanese and his mother was American. In 1927 he worked in Paris for seven months as the assistant to sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Noguchi travelled widely in the US, Europe and Asia to study sculpture. In 1936 he had a brief affair with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and they remained friends for the rest of her life. Although Noguchi was exempt from internment during the Second World War, he lived voluntarily in a camp for six months with the intention of teaching and using art to boost morale among the Japanese captives. His international breakthrough came in the 1950s and 60s with his often biomorphic sculptures in stone, wood and metal. Noguchi’s coffee table and his Akari light sculptures, made by stretching Japanese washi paper over a wooden frame, are considered design classics.
Citizen of the world
Noguchi’s innovative approach to sculpture made a lasting impression on the art world. The artist’s comment in 1936 that A sculpture is a relationship of forms in space expressed his idea that anything occupying space has sculptural potential. He regarded all his gardens, furniture, lamps, playground equipment, stage sets and ceramics as sculptures. Noguchi’s rich body of work reflects his life as a global citizen, and as a child caught between the two worlds of Japan, through his father, and America, through his mother. His key works include Red Cube in New York (1968), Horace E. Dodge Fountain in Detroit (1976), the garden design for UNESCO in Paris (1956-1958) and the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1960-1965). In 1986, Noguchi represented the US at the Venice Biennale. His eye-catching centrepiece was the spiral slide located directly in front of the US pavilion. In the Netherlands his work can be seen at the Kröller-Müller Museum and Museum Voorlinden.