Latest news with #MoMA
Japan Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
The many lives of Nakagin Capsule Tower on display at New York's MoMA
Despite a yearslong battle for its preservation, the Nakagin Capsule Tower designed by Kisho Kurokawa was dismantled in 2022. However, in a poetic exemplification of the tenets of the metabolism movement that it once represented, the beloved building continues its existence, albeit broken down in parts, akin energy from food metabolized in a body. The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project saved 23 of Nakagin's capsules and has been restoring a number of them under the supervision of Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates. The refurbished capsules started resurfacing in public as early as 2023, with a unit turned into a van by the Yodogawa Steel Works company. More units were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art Saitama, the Museum of Modern Art in Wakayama, M+ in Hong Kong, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. From July 10, 2025, through July 12, 2026, MoMA is displaying the A1305 capsule in its street-level galleries in Manhattan as part of a larger exhibition titled 'The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower,' showcasing the 50-year history of the building through nearly 45 pieces of contextual material. 'These materials include the project's only surviving model from 1970–72; original drawings, photographs and promotional ephemera; an archival film and audio recordings; interviews with former tenants; and an interactive virtual tour of the entire building,' states MoMA's press release. MoMA members have the opportunity to enter the Nakagin capsule during a number of special activation events during the exhibition. | Jonathan Dorado "The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower" is on view in the street-facing galleries of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from July 10, 2025, through July 12, 2026. | Jonathan Dorado Evangelos Kotsioris, who led the exhibition's curatorial team, told The Yomiuri Shimbun in writing that the museum housed the capsule because the tower is 'one of the most important buildings of the 20th century.' The 'many lives' in the exhibition's title allude not only to the refurbished capsules but to the people who once made their homes in the 140 single-room apartments of the retro-futuristic building in Tokyo's Ginza. Photos and videos show a range of interiors, from a simple minimalist bedroom to a tea ceremony room and a DJ booth. 'Each capsule — that is to say, each unit — is an expression of the idiosyncrasies of each individual,' wrote Kurokawa in 'Oh! The Code of the Cyborg.' The architect had always imagined that his poster-child of metabolist architecture would transform and change. While Kurosawa once drew up plans for a twin building to Nakagin Capsule Tower that was never realized, the latest exhibition is an invitation to imagine both the structure's past lives and its future potential we have yet to experience. 'The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower' in New York's Museum of Modern Art runs through July 12, 2026. For more information, visit
Yomiuri Shimbun
04-07-2025
- General
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Tower Unit to be Shown at MoMA in New York
Part of an iconic residential capsule building in Tokyo's Ginza district that was demolished in 2022 will be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from July 10. Designed by the late architect Kisho Kurokawa (1934-2007), the Nakagin Capsule Tower building was completed in 1972 as a housing complex comprising a total of 140 single-room housing capsules. One of the capsules, now housed in the renowned institution for modern and contemporary art, will be shown at the exhibition 'The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower,' focusing on the building's 50-year history, until July 12, 2026. Thanks to the design using detachable and replaceable capsules, which each had about 10 square meters of space inside, the building was famous as a structure that represented Japan's Metabolism architectural movement. It is also one of the representative works of Kurokawa, who designed the National Art Center, Tokyo, and the Toshiba IHI Pavilion for the 1970 Osaka Expo. The capsules were never replaced, and the building was dismantled due to aging in 2022. The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project, a citizen group formed by former unit owners and others to preserve the building, obtained and restored 23 capsules. The preservation group has been searching for recipients for them. To date, capsules taken from the building have been added to the collections of several prominent overseas museums, including M+, one of Asia's largest contemporary art museums in Hong Kong, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Evangelos Kotsioris, assistant curator at MoMA, told The Yomiuri Shimbun in writing that the museum housed the capsule because the tower is 'one of the most important buildings of the 20th century at large.' 'The Nakagin Capsule Tower anticipated contemporary conversations about circularity in architecture, in other words, the idea that designers should not only think about the design and construction of buildings, but also their life cycles, and ultimate disassembly and repurposing of the materials that made them up,' Kotsioris wrote, adding that the museum concluded that the capsule deserves a place in MoMA's collection. '[The capsule] is a cozy space that has inspired generations of architects, and captivated the imaginations of both residents and people around the world,' Kotsioris wrote. In addition to the capsule with its interior fully restored to the state it was in when the building was completed, about 45 related materials that include photographs, films and the project's original models and drawings will be on display during the upcoming exhibition.
UAE Moments
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- UAE Moments
The Six Best Paintings by Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh is one of the most celebrated and influential artists in history. Known for his expressive use of color, bold brushstrokes, and emotionally charged works, van Gogh created around 900 paintings during his lifetime. Though he faced personal struggles and limited recognition while alive, his artwork is now considered priceless. Here are six of the best paintings by Vincent van Gogh that exemplify his visionary talent and enduring legacy. 1. The Starry Night (1889) Arguably van Gogh's most iconic work, The Starry Night captures a swirling night sky over the village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Created while van Gogh was in a mental asylum, the painting expresses both turbulence and serenity with its dynamic sky, cypress trees, and quiet town below. The bold colors and rhythmic brushwork make it one of the most recognized and loved paintings in the world. Location: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 2. Irises (1889) Painted during his time at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, Irises showcases van Gogh's fascination with nature and color. The vivid blues, purples, and greens highlight his attention to detail and unique composition style. Each iris is given its personality, making the painting feel alive and full of motion. Location: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 3. Sunflowers (1888) Van Gogh's Sunflowers series is among his most celebrated works. The version created in Arles features a vibrant bouquet of sunflowers in a simple vase. The yellows range from golden to ochre, reflecting van Gogh's mastery of color and light. The painting symbolizes friendship and gratitude and was created to decorate the guest room for his friend Paul Gauguin. Location: National Gallery, London 4. The Bedroom in Arles (1888) The Bedroom is a deeply personal painting that represents comfort, solitude, and van Gogh's longing for stability. The use of flat colors and skewed perspective gives the room a dreamlike quality. This painting was one of van Gogh's favorites, and he created three versions of it. Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 5. Wheatfield with Crows (1890) Believed to be one of van Gogh's final works, Wheatfield with Crows conveys a sense of foreboding and emotional intensity. The dark sky, swirling crows, and divided path reflect the inner turmoil he experienced shortly before his death. The painting is often seen as a haunting yet powerful farewell from the artist. Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 6. The Avenue of Les Alyscamps (1888) Painted during his time in Arles, The Avenue of Les Alyscamps depicts a tree-lined Roman necropolis path in rich autumn colors. Van Gogh was inspired by the changing seasons and often painted this site with Gauguin. The vibrant oranges and yellows highlight his skill in capturing the mood and atmosphere of a setting. Final Brushstroke Vincent van Gogh's work transcends time, emotion, and artistic convention. These six paintings reflect his unique vision and the intensity with which he saw the world. Whether you're an art lover or a curious admirer, exploring these masterpieces offers a deeper appreciation of one of history's greatest painters.
Straits Times
24-06-2025
- General
- Straits Times
Arnaldo Pomodoro, sculptor of monumental fractured spheres, dies at 98
ROME - Arnaldo Pomodoro, a postwar Italian artist whose monumental spheres – highly polished but jarringly fractured – populate public squares around the world, died on June 22 at his home in Milan. He was 98. His death, coming the day before his 99th birthday, was announced by his niece Carlotta Montebello, who is director-general of Pomodoro's foundation in Milan. A self-taught artist who trained as an engineer and goldsmith, Pomodoro was best known for his imposing bronze spherical sculptures, which stand outside the United Nations headquarters in New York; inside Vatican City; on the campus of Trinity College Dublin; at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; and at many other locations. His other major public works include Entrance to the Labyrinth, an enormous maze adorned with cuneiform sculptural formations in Milan; a controversial fiberglass crucifix that hangs in the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist in Milwaukee; and Disco, a giant bronze disk, also in Milan, where he spent much of his life. 'Pomodoro was one of a number of important European artists to emerge from the aftermath of World War II whose work dealt with the effects of a world destabilised by nuclear arms, economic hardships and the trauma of the Holocaust,' Dr Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, said in an email in 2021. Pomodoro's spheres, he added, 'were widely admired at the time for their resonance with other postwar expressionist movements'. Pomodoro's spheres began to gain worldwide attention in the 1960s. He won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1963 and the National Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale the subsequent year. The Marlborough Gallery hosted two major solo exhibitions at its venues in Rome and New York in 1965, and he was featured in Time magazine. The Museum of Modern Art was one of the first museums to recognise the significance of his work. In 1964, MoMA acquired Sphere 1, a year after it was made. Pomodoro won the International Prize for Sculpture from the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1967, and he was invited to teach at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, institutions where he maintained a teaching relationship throughout the years. By the early 1970s, American art critic Sam Hunter wrote that Pomodoro had become, 'in the world's eyes, Italy's leading artistic figure', producing sculptures that were both 'marketable as well as being serious aesthetic objects'. 'His most persistent metaphor has been to cut away the facade, or skin of things, to get at the vulnerable and fragile inner core,' Mr Hunter added. Arnaldo Armando Pomodoro was born on June 23, 1926, in Morciano di Romagna, a small town near Rimini, on Italy's eastern coast. He was the eldest of three children of Antonio and Beatrice (Luzzi) Pomodoro. His mother was a talented dressmaker, and his father was a sometime poet. When Arnaldo was just a few months old, the family moved to nearby Orciano di Pesaro, in the Marche region, where his brother, Gio, was born in 1930, and his sister, Teresa, in 1941. After high school, Pomodoro earned a diploma as a surveyor, graduating at the end of World War II, when there was a great demand for engineers. His first job was as a consultant in the Pesaro civil engineering department, advising on the reconstruction of buildings damaged in the war. At the same time, he developed his artistic side, attending the local Mengaroni Art Institute, where he focused on stage design. He also worked as a goldsmith. In 1953, at age 27, Pomodoro travelled to Milan to see a Pablo Picasso exhibition at the Royal Palace. Picasso's monumental canvas Guernica, which depicts the horrors of war, was on display in the palace's Sala delle Cariatidi, which had yet to be restored after it was bombed in 1943. Profoundly moved by the experience, Pomodoro decided to move to Milan, where he encountered some of the emerging masters of the postwar Italian art scene, including Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo and Lucio Fontana. These artists were pushing the boundaries of art into more expressionistic realms, and he followed their lead. He began creating high-relief works and exhibiting them; by 1956, he had work in the Venice Biennale. Pomodoro became increasingly curious about American abstract expressionists, whose work he had seen at art collector Peggy Guggenheim's home in Venice and at the Paris Biennale. He applied for and received a study grant from the Italian Foreign Ministry, and in 1959, he traveled to California and New York to exhibit the work of Italian contemporary artists and to meet American artists. It proved to be a life-altering trip. In California, he met Mark Rothko; and in New York, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He got to know sculptors Louise Nevelson, David Smith and Mark di Suvero, who were creating outsize outdoor artworks using heavy materials, such as castoff wood scraps and steel beams. He also visited the Museum of Modern Art, where he saw for the first time sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian modernist artist. Later, in an interview with Italian art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Pomodoro said, 'I was born as a sculptor in the Brancusi room at MoMA.' Working from sleek, polished forms like Brancusi's, he sliced through them – just as Lucio Fontana had slashed through canvases – to reveal a complex inner core. At first, these interiors appear chaotic, but they suggest some kind of indecipherable organisational system, like the innards of a machine. Most of Pomodoro's work continued in this vein: He started with a glossy geometric form, such as a column, block or disk, then cut away at its perfection, adding erosions, tears and fissures. He explained that when faced by the 'perfect purity of Brancusi's works', he began to consider the 'outdatedness of that perfection'. 'This was the early '60s,' he said in an interview for his 90th birthday with Italian journalist Ada Masoera. 'We were living in tense and changing times, seeking out new values.' He felt the impulse, he said, to 'dig into the geometric shapes to discover the internal ferment, the mystery that had been enclosed, the vitality within'. Pomodoro's works have been collected by many museums around the world. In the United States, they include the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. He established the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation in Milan in 1995, originally intending it to document and archive his work. Four years later, he added an exhibition space, which briefly presented art by other 20th century artists. It closed in 2012. The foundation continued to operate out of his home and studio in Milan, where he established project rooms, where young artists were given space to work and exhibit. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. His brother, Gio Pomodoro, also became a sculptor; he died in 2002. Gio's son, Bruto Pomodoro, is also an artist. Arnaldo Pomodoro's artistic vision allowed for the world to have both its clean, glossy exterior and a complicated interior. As art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, a longtime friend of his, put it, 'Pomodoro's vision has always been cosmic, aimed at wholeness'. Mr Hunter wrote in 1972 that Pomodoro's work remained 'a powerful metaphor of violence and revelation in art, and keeps the dialectic between inward and outer man ongoing and open-ended, and always surprising.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
New York Times
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Best Art Shows of 2025, So Far
Art-wise, 2025 has already packed some hot events into a few short months. After being closed for several years, two monumental museum projects — an expanded Frick Collection and the Met's reimagined Rockefeller wing — splendiferously unfurled. Major exhibitions of European art, including ancient Roman sculptures and 19th-century German Romantic painting by Casper David Friedrich, landed with acclaim in Chicago and New York. Spring delivered a long-overdue tribute to the great under-sung contemporary artist Jack Whitten at MoMA. Solo surveys elsewhere brought significant midcareer figures — Lorna Simpson and Rashid Johnson — into rich focus, and offered a first full look at the much-noticed portraitist Amy Sherald. More good news: much of all this bounty is still on view right now. Holland Cotter 'Amy Sherald: American Sublime' Whitney Museum of American Art Amy Sherald is drawn to loud, retro-ish fabrics — to wide stripes and dresses imprinted with floral patterns or strewed with rows of strawberries or cherries or lemons. She excels at painting pleated skirts, their folds of fabric as stately and evenly spaced as ancient Greek columns. And note the exaggeratedly clean ambience. White shirts gleam with Tide-strength brightness, and khakis remain unblemished by mystery grease stains. You cannot find fresher clothing in the work of any contemporary painter, with the exception of Alex Katz, the pre-eminent realist who similarly garbs his figures in shirts and pants that look as if they were removed five minutes earlier from a J. Crew gift box. In the case of both artists, the squeaky-clean attire echoes in the formal neatness of their respective painting styles. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
