The Bruce Museum announces a new exhibition in its Sculpture Gallery, “Isamu Noguchi: Metal the Mirror,” showcasing the visionary work of one of the 20th century’s most influential artists and designers. The exhibition will run from April 5-November 16, 2025, offering visitors a rare opportunity to explore Noguchi’s innovative use of galvanized steel.
Recognized for his ability to blend Eastern and Western influences with modernist principles, Noguchi (1904–1988) redefined the boundaries of art, design, and functionality. While best known for his work in stone, Noguchi consistently explored new materials and methods during his wide-ranging career. He first experimented with aluminum in the 1950s and later with galvanized steel, creating a series of twenty-six sculptures in collaboration with Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles in 1982–83. In this body of work, each sheet of metal is cut with a plasma torch and then dipped into boiling zinc, resulting in sculptures that are subtly patterned and highly reflective, resembling pebbles in a stream or the epidermal layer of skin.
Writing about the unique materiality of his sculptures, Noguchi described metal as a mirror in opposition to “stone [as] depth.” His galvanized steel sculptures achieve formal unity while also exploring conceptual dualities between the traditional and modern, fine art and design, and industry and nature. As a Japanese American artist working in the United States, Noguchi negotiated his own feeling of in-betweenness throughout his practice. The galvanized steel editions synthesize this dual aspect of his identity, utilizing steel—a distinctly American material—while also integrating the Japanese craft of origami through cut and folded metal shapes.
Featuring a selection of nine galvanized steel sculptures, the exhibition is organized into thematic groupings that showcase the artist’s mastery of material, form and texture. In the first, Noguchi imparts inanimate forms with human qualities, complicating the relationship between flesh and steel, body and mirror. Man-made material is transformed into representations of mountains, fruit, and sky in the second grouping, reflecting Noguchi’s belief that, in modernity, industry and nature are intertwined. A final trio of works reveals Noguchi’s ongoing interest in abstraction, bringing theoretical and spiritual ideas, weight and weightlessness, and past and present into visual conversation. Through these sculptures, Noguchi explores ways of belonging in between such imagined oppositions. Indeed, the polished steel surfaces reflect objects, spaces, and people in a tangled network, inviting visitors to contemplate Noguchi’s life, his practice, and themselves.
Isamu Noguchi: Metal the Mirror is organized by Art Bridges and curated by Julia Mun, Assistant Curator, with support from Ashley Holland, Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Javier Rivero Ramos, Associate Curator. The presentation at the Bruce is organized by Margarita Karasoulas, Curator of Art.
