KELLY AKASHI: HEIRLOOM

LISSON GALLERY presents Kelly Akashi’s first exhibition with the gallery in New York, titled “Heirloom.”

May 13 - July 25, 2026

This new series of works builds upon her seminal 2025 presentation in Los Angeles. While that exhibition explored inheritance through formal and material tension, “Heirloom” focuses on the conditions of loss and mourning, questioning how absence is sustained, transmitted, and materialized. The exhibition coincides with Akashi’s participation in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and precedes the unveiling of her commission for the new Terminal One at John F. Kennedy International Airport, in collaboration with senior curator Culture Corps.

Using bronze, Corten steel, blown glass, and carved stone, Akashi conceives of sculpture as a space where loss can be recorded without resolution. These materials do not conceal the rupture but rather perpetuate it, allowing the traces of erosion, oxidation, and transformation to remain visible. Form is subject to continuous processes of change through which matter records duration. In this sense, the works function as accumulations of time, where loss is not an isolated event, but a condition that develops, settles, and transforms.

For the past year, Akashi has tended the land and cultivated a garden where her house and studio once stood. This act of care becomes the central focus of the exhibition, not as restoration, but as a practice of attending to what endures. In "Heirloom," organic forms extracted from that site reappear as bronze roses, lilies, and branches. Cast directly in metal, these elements become relics and resilient markers of domesticity and care. They evoke gestures of preservation that attempt to commemorate, even when their original context has vanished. The works maintain a tension between resilience and fragility, suggesting memory as something reconstituted to be reclaimed.

At the heart of the exhibition is an enlarged reproduction of an inherited stone ring that the artist once wore. Enlarged to a monumental scale, yet retaining the original's rough surface, the work oscillates between bodily intimacy and geological presence. Its altered proportions allude to how grief transforms perception, magnifying absence until it surpasses our capacity to contain it. The sculpture does not function as a replacement. Instead, it poses a confrontation with weight—both literal and psychological—as something that propels us forward.

A pair of Corten steel panels, cut from lace patterns traced from scans of her grandmother's handmade lace tablecloth, extend this exploration of the articulation of absence. Suspended with a gap between them, the panels define a space of interruption that resists closure. The material itself is fundamental. Corten steel records exposure over time; its surface continually oxidizes, increasing its structural integrity despite its weathered patina. Here, permanence and impermanence coexist, allowing absence to be understood as an active and constant presence rather than a void. Nearby, works on paper covered with book ash incorporate remnants of the artist's former library. The delicate lace pattern evokes domestic familiarity, alluding to the systems of transmission through which knowledge, memory, and history are passed on. These works situate personal grief within broader temporal and cultural continuities.

Glass works complete the exhibition, introducing a language of fragility and exposure. A mallow plant, originally found during a gardening outing, has been recreated in glass with its root system exposed. This species often sprouts from disturbed soils and symbolizes the emerging biodiversity following a disaster. Another sculpture in glass and bronze adopts a finely reticulated botanical form that suggests both containment and permeability. Its intricate construction reflects a profound contemplation of vulnerability, where delicacy is not a weakness, but a form of attentiveness. In these works, loss is neither concealed nor resolved. It is articulated through forms that remain open, provisional, and receptive.

Heirloom draws inspiration from Akashi's conception of sculpture as a medium uniquely capable of containing absence within materiality. Rather than treating relics as static symbols of memory, the exhibition proposes them as dynamic bearers of history, shaped as much by what is no longer present as by what endures.