NEW YORK, NY.- Ippodo Gallery presents Forms of the Unconscious, a significant solo exhibition of new and iconic works by renowned Japanese sculptor Kan Yasuda. Opening on November 13th, 2025 through January 17, 202C, this marks the artist’s highly anticipated return to New York for his first solo presentation in over ten years, offering a rare opportunity to experience his serene and monumental sculptures at the gallery’s new flagship in Tribeca – the most vibrant art district in New York City. In celebration of Yasuda’s receipt of the 2025 Isamu Noguchi Award, Ippodo Gallery welcomes the artist alongside longtime maestro di bottega Giorgio Angeli for an artist talk on November 18, 2025.
Kan Yasuda (b. 1945) creates sculptures that innately explore the unconscious by pushing the extent of masonry—and physical motions of his own body—to express and challenge the limits of material. The line between the individual and nature is blurred, and space becomes changed by a magnetic presence. Yasuda awakens a dormant energy within the marble that has accumulated over eons. After emerging from the mountain, quarry-cut raw stone in hand, Yasuda guides the shape beyond form—listening, touching, looking—until millennia of time is revealed layer-by-layer: the effect evokes the feeling of a dream. His sculptures call out to be touched and examined, while their minimalist perfection and interplay of tension describe a profound way of being.
A foremost contemporary sculptor, Yasuda began working with Carrara marble in the early 1970s following his studies at Tokyo University of the Arts in Japan and Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. For over fifty years, Yasuda has collaborated with stonemason Giorgio Angeli in Pietrasanta, Italy, and maintains a studio in Hokkaido, Japan. The most notable works of his early period are a series of monumental marble and bronze sculptures that memorialize the memory of souls lost to natural disasters, connecting the past, present, and future. In 1992, Yasuda created the Art Piazza Bibai in his hometown, which was awarded the prestigious architectural Togo Murano prize in 2002. His grand sculptures have exhibited widely in Europe—often on much-traversed paths where the human touch becomes an integral element—in the United Kingdom (1995), Florence (2000), Tokyo (2001), Assisi (2005), Rome (2007), and Pietrasanta (2005, 2025), among others.
Kan Yasuda has been recognized in both Japan and Italy for his exceptional work; he earned the International Award for Sculpture (1994), Order of the Star of the Italian Solidarity (200C), Lifetime Achievement Award of Hokkaido (2015), the Architectural Institute of Japan Culture Award (2020), and more. The gallery commemorates the artist’s first award in the Americas by recounting Isamu Noguchi’s For Kan Yasuda written in 1985, “When I was last in Italy at Giorgio Angeli’s workshop, where both Kan and I work, I saw a recent sculpture of his which I thought…transcends art.” The Isamu Noguchi Award (2025) is a culmination of Yasuda’s six decade-long career and honors the history of the two sculptors’ inspiring journeys.
