Isamu Noguchi

White Cube Mason’s Yard is pleased to present This Earth, This Passage, a selection of artworks by Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) which collectively reflect the artist's engagement with material, performance and notions of place.

The exhibition takes its title from a 1962 sculpture: a bronze ring cast from clay impressed by Noguchi’s body as he walked over the yielding surface. Preserving physical imprints in its form, the work invokes a central tenet of Noguchi's practice: to expand human consciousness through observable experience and, in turn, enhance one's sense of belonging.

Extending Noguchi’s understanding of the body as a conduit for experience, This Earth, This Passage brings together work from the 1920s to the 1980s in varied materials: bronze, hot-dipped galvanized steel, basalt and granite. The diversity of materials attests to the interdisciplinary nature of the artist’s practice, informed by his itinerant travels and belief that art is in a ‘constant process of becoming'.

Making explicit the figurative and performative facets of his practice, over three decades Noguchi created more than twenty set designs for the choreographer Martha Graham (1894–1991), a leader in mid-20th century modernism. Noguchi’s sculptural scenography serves as a setting for Graham’s Dark Meadow (1946) – a performance musing on rebirth, relationality and the process of life itself.

Both the mise-en-scène for Graham’s choreography and Noguchi’s work in stone and metal constitute psycho-geographic sites in which selfhood, place and materiality cohere.

One of the most significant artists of the 20th century, Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was an idealist whose timeless work blended ancient and modern ideas. An itinerant cultural synthesizer, he consistently rejected categorization and the false dichotomies of his time, espoused globalism and anticipated the social practice of art by several decades. Primarily a sculptor, Noguchi’s expansive, interdisciplinary practice included public projects, gardens, playgrounds, furniture, lighting and set design, all informed by an abiding view that nature was of fundamental importance to the human condition and a determination to make work which encouraged this belief.