Kelly Akashi

The first exhibition dedicated to the artist by an Italian institution, the project presents a series of new works designed specifically to dialogue with the museum’s spaces and collection.
Kelly Akashi is a Japanese-American artist, born and raised in Los Angeles, whose practice is distinguished by her ability to reconcile a conceptual approach with an attention to form and process. Always carried out with great skill and a profound knowledge of materials, Akashi’s works explore universal concepts such as time and space, the impermanence of the natural world, the transience of the human body, and entropy.
Attracted to materials like glass, wax, and bronze, Akashi shapes them by creating forms that reproduce natural elements such as plants, flowers, shells, or parts of her own body, recording their physiological changes and the passage of time. Juxtaposed in poetic compositions that often look fragile and precious, these familiar yet alienating forms explore existential questions, encouraging us to look at things from a different, broader and less anthropocentric perspective.
The project that Akashi has come up with for the Furla Series revolves around the concept and phenomenon of “reflection,” explored through a visionary path that winds its way right through the permanent collection, creating a dialogue and synergy with the museum’s architecture and masterpieces.

Kelly Akashi’s exhibition is the sixth edition of the Furla Series project, and is the upshot of the collaboration between Fondazione Furla and GAM: a partnership begun in 2021 to promote annual exhibition projects providing a unique opportunity for past masters and protagonists of the contemporary scene to come face to face.
Furla Series is the project cycle that since 2017 has seen the Fondazione Furla engaged in the creation of exhibitions in collaboration with major Italian art institutions, with an all-female program designed to valorize and showcase women’s fundamental contribution to contemporary culture.

Kelly Akashi was born in 1983 in Los Angeles, CA, where she lives and works. She recently concluded a major solo traveling exhibition entitled Formations, of which was accompanied by the publication of the first in-depth monograph on the artist. The exhibition traveled from the San Jose Museum of Art, to the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle, and to the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (2022-2024). Other important solo exhibitions include, Encounters, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2023); Cultivator, Aspen Art Museum (2020); a thing among things, ARCH Athens, Greece (2019); and Long Exposure curated by Ruba Katrib, SculptureCenter, New York (2017). She is a winner of the 2024 MOCA Distinguished Women in the Arts Award, the 2022 LACMA Art + Technology Grant, and the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize. Akashi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and San Diego; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford; CC Foundation, Shanghai; X Museum, Beijing; The Perimeter, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Sifang Museum, Nanjing, among others.

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Cover photo by: Kelly Akashi. Photo courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo credit: Brad Torchia.