Retrospective:
Space In-Between: Shizuko Yoshikawa and Josef Müller-Brockmann
Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka

Opening: December 21, 2024
Exhibition through March 2, 2025

The exhibition showcases the work of Japanese artist Shizuko Yoshikawa and Swiss design pioneer Josef Müller-Brockmann. It is the first comprehensive institutional exhibition of the creative couple in Japan, curated in collaboration with the Shizuko Yoshikawa and Josef Müller-Brockmann Foundation Zurich (Naoko Hirai, NAKKA & Gabrielle Schaad, Shizuko Yoshikawa and Josef Müller-Brockmann Foundation; with the support of Lars Müller, Shizuko Yoshikawa and Josef Müller-Brockmann Foundation).

This double-retrospective presents the complete range of works of the artist Shizuko Yoshikawa as well as the constructive-concrete poster designs of Josef Müller-Brockmann, who was crucial in shaping the world-famous ‘Swiss Style’. The exhibition sheds light on the unique personal and professional, transnational relationship between this artist couple. Yoshikawa and Müller-Brockmann were Zurich-based artists and designers. They first met in 1960 at the World Design Conference in Tokyo, where Yoshikawa, a graduate of Tsuda University in English, took part as an interpreter. Inspired by this international gathering, she became the first female Japanese student to attend the Ulm School of Design. She later worked in Müller-Brockmann’s design office in Zurich. Their professional collaboration developed into a lifelong partnership, with both of them breaking ground in their respective fields.

Shizuko Yoshikawa (1934–2019) spent most of her life in Switzerland as a highly educated, self-determined woman. After studying at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (Ulm School of Design) and her introduction to the Zurich Concrete art scene, she married Josef Müller-Brockmann and developed her artistic career from Zurich. In her work, however, she gradually distanced herself from the concrete traditions of modernism and instead emphasized the atmospheric and ephemeral. For the first time after her decease in 2019, a selection of her reliefs, paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints created in Switzerland are now being shown in a comprehensive retrospective in a Japanese museum.

The Swiss design pioneer Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–1996) visited Japan several times between the 1960s and 1980s. While deepening his friendships with Japanese designers like Yusaku Kamekura, he also contributed to design education in Japan by teaching at design schools and art universities. Müller-Brockmann revolutionized graphic design with his ‘grid system’, which enables a precise, mathematically structured arrangement of layouts. This system led to a clear, functional aesthetic that was strongly influenced by the Bauhaus and the Swiss School of Design and continues to have an impact today. Among other things, he created the strictly functional and memorable sign and font system for the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), which has characterized the appearance of SBB for over forty years.

The Nakanoshima Museum of Art, NAKKA, which opened in 2022, was originally conceived in the 1990s as a center for modern and contemporary art and design in the heart of Osaka, Japan’s commercial metropolis. The municipal collection comprises more than 5,700 works from the fields of painting, sculpture, installation art, graphic design and photography from the 19th to the 21st century. It shows works by important artists such as the Gutai Group, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Tadanori Yokoo and Amedeo Modigliani as well as design pioneers such as Alvar Aalto and Shiro Kuramata. The museum fosters artistic dialog, connects past and present, and highlights Osaka’s rich cultural heritage within an international context.