Everything is sculpture - Isamu Noguchi

Long before our heavily cross-pollinated times, Isamu Noguchi established himself as a true revolutionary with a six-decade career that merged art, sculpture, architecture and design. He refused categorization, focusing purely on the moment at hand to create a poetic, highly idiosyncratic body of work. Needless to say, Noguchi remains a relevant touchstone for today’s generation of designers, artists and architects.

One of Noguchi’s most marked characteristics - his refusal to be pinned to a single category - is being celebrated at New York’s Noguchi Museum with an exhibition titled Solid Doubts: Robert Stadler at The Noguchi Museum.
The excellent show, curated by Dakin Hart, pairs Noguchi’s work with that of Robert Stadler, a Vienna-born Paris-based artist and designer.

Like Noguchi, Stadler’s work blends furniture and art and relishes the gray area in between. Working with materials such as marble, leather and cast-aluminum, Stadler creates works of beauty, finesse and depth. It has been described as trans-disciplinary by critics and has become highly prized by collectors.

The must-see exhibition is presented in four installations on the museum’s ground floor galleries and outdoor terrace. According to its curator, the show is very much defined by breaking rules, not following them; here, “ the nature of and distinctions between “art” and “design,”
“functional” and “aesthetic,” and “material” and “space,” seem to dissolve. The point being that one walks away with more questions than answers. Just as Noguchi would have wanted it.