5 Exhibitions to See In Japan This Week: A Lucie Rie Retrospective, Degas, Manet, and the Allure of the Café
From major museum shows to gallery highlights, ARTnews JAPAN editors select the must-see exhibitions now on view across Japan. This article is also available in Japanese.
- 1. Artists at the Café: From the Impressionists, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec to Picasso (Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum)
- 2. Tomoo Gokita “Lush Life” (Taka Ishii Gallery, Roppongi and Kyobashi)
- 3. I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (Shibuya Hikarie Hall)
- 4. Lucie Rie: Elegant Vessels Fusing East and West (Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum)
- 5. Niki de Saint Phalle: Anubis / Thoeris / Horus (ANOMALY)
1. Artists at the Café: From the Impressionists, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec to Picasso (Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum)
Photo: Courtesy of Kyoto Institute of Technology Museum and Archives (AN.4829)
Where Modern Art Convened
In late nineteenth century Paris, cafés and cabarets were more than places to socialize — they were creative hubs where artists, writers, and critics gathered to forge new modes of expression. This exhibition takes the café as its lens on the development of modern art, from Impressionism through Post-Impressionism to Picasso, and captures the mood of an era when the Salon system was losing its grip and artists were forming communities of their own.
The show brings together some 130 works, including paintings by Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Picasso alongside posters and archival materials. The show highlights the young Picasso's circle at Els Quatre Gats ("The Four Cats"), the storied Barcelona café, tracing the creative turning point that led to his Blue Period. Beyond the works on view, the exhibition frames modern art's development through the artists' exchanges and the communities they built.
Artists at the Café: From the Impressionists, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec to Picasso
Dates: Saturday, June 13 – Wednesday, September 23
Venue: Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum (2-6-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 10:00–18:00 (until 20:00 on Fridays, the second Wednesday of the month, July 25, and September 19–23; last admission 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (except national holidays, July 27, and August 31)
2. Tomoo Gokita “Lush Life” (Taka Ishii Gallery, Roppongi and Kyobashi)
New Paintings for an Uneasy Era
Tomoo Gokita, a painter who is acclaimed both in Japan and abroad, has expanded his practice from monochrome into vivid color, building his own visual vocabulary.
Gokita's seventh solo show with the gallery unfolds across two venues, Kyobashi and Roppongi, and centers on new oil paintings he resumed making last year. The works on view range across figures, animals, landscapes, and abstract imagery. Gokita has said the series moved naturally toward darker tones as he worked; even as it registers the unease of the present moment, the work draws out the vitality and hope that lie beneath the human surface.
Tomoo Gokita “Lush Life”
Dates: Saturday, June 27 – Saturday, July 25
Venue: Taka Ishii Gallery, Roppongi (complex665 3F, 6-5-24 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo) and Kyobashi (Toda Building 3F, 1-7-1 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: Roppongi 12:00–19:00; Kyobashi 11:00–19:00
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and national holidays
3. I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (Shibuya Hikarie Hall)
A New Vantage on Women Photographers
Surveying the practice of Japanese women photographers from the 1950s to the present, this exhibition dubbed “I’m So Happy You Are Here” has earned international acclaim for illuminating a side of photographic history that has long gone under-examined. The show debuted at the 2024 Rencontres d'Arles photography festival and has since toured Europe and the United States; this expanded edition now arrives in Japan.
For this presentation, the scope expands further, bringing together some 200 works by a total of 30 artists. Miyako Ishiuchi, Rinko Kawauchi, Lieko Shiga, Tomoko Sawada, Mika Ninagawa, Mari Katayama, Miwa Yanagi, and Yurie Nagashima are among the photographers exhibited, spanning multiple generations and a wide range of approaches. Alongside photographic works, the show also incorporates video and installation. Moving through themes of personal memory, the body, gender, family, and society, it offers a wide view of the richness and diversity of Japanese photographic expression.
I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now
Dates: Saturday, July 4 – Wednesday, August 26
Venue: Shibuya Hikarie Hall (Shibuya Hikarie 9F, 2-21-1 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 10:00–19:00
Closed: No closures during the run
4. Lucie Rie: Elegant Vessels Fusing East and West (Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum)
A Vision Shaped Between Vienna and London
A retrospective devoted to Lucie Rie (1902–1995), a master of modern ceramics who built her career in Britain. Born in Vienna, Rie relocated to England in 1938 and went on to develop a singular ceramic practice defined by refined wheel-thrown forms and inventive glazing. Her work fuses function and sculptural beauty to an exceptional degree, and is celebrated as some of the defining ceramic art of the twentieth century.
Traveling from last year's presentation at the National Crafts Museum, this marks Rie's first full-scale retrospective in Japan in roughly a decade. Centered on the Inai Collection, it brings together key works spanning her early career through her late period. The show also includes works by artists in Rie's circle, among them Josef Hoffmann, Bernard Leach, and Hans Coper, unpacking the sensibility she formed by moving between the Wiener Werkstätte and East Asian ceramic traditions.
Lucie Rie: Elegant Vessels Fusing East and West
Dates: Saturday, July 4 – Sunday, September 13
Venue: Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum (5-21-9 Shirokanedai, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 10:00–18:00 (last admission 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (except July 20, open; July 21, closed)
5. Niki de Saint Phalle: Anubis / Thoeris / Horus (ANOMALY)
Myth Cast in Bronze
One of the defining artists of the twentieth century, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) has worked primarily out of France. She drew early attention in the 1960s with her Tirs series, then built an international reputation through her voluptuous Nanas. Moving across sculpture, architecture, and film, she pursued enduring themes of myth, femininity, and death and rebirth throughout her career. In recent years, a wave of reappraisal centered in Europe and the U.S. has brought renewed attention to her pioneering practice.
Billed as Saint Phalle's first Tokyo solo show in around a decade, the exhibition presents three painted bronze sculptures, each standing over two meters tall, modeled on the ancient Egyptian deities Anubis, Thoeris, and Horus. The works can be read as an extension of the mythological imagination behind The Tarot Garden, her late-career masterpiece. Rendered in vivid color and organic form, the sculptures offer a full immersion in Saint Phalle's singular visual language.
Niki de Saint Phalle: Anubis / Thoeris / Horus
Dates: Wednesday, June 10 – Saturday, July 11
Venue: ANOMALY (TERRADA Art Complex I 4F, 1-33-10 Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 12:00–18:00
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and national holidays
