Alfredo Jaar: Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Alfredo Jaar opening July 22, 2023 at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan. The exhibition is held in conjunction with Jaar's receipt of the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize. 

Established in 1989 by the City of Hiroshima, site of the first atomic bombing in human history, the Hiroshima Art Prize aims to appeal to a wider world about the “Spirit of Hiroshima,” which seeks everlasting world peace through contemporary art. The prize is awarded every three years. Jaar joins a series of distinguished recipients, including Cai Guo Qiang, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Mona Hatoum, Daniel Libeskind, Issey Miyake, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Doris Salcedo, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. 

This exhibition, Jaar’s first full-fledged museum exhibition ever held in Japan, functions as a career-spanning survey which includes some of the most important works created by the artist, including a selection of three major installations shown together for the first time, as well as newly commissioned works that approach Hiroshima as a contemporary issue. Works on view will include two new neons—one in English and one in Japanese—that read "Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness," the title of a novella by the late Japanese writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kenzaburō Ōe. While this phrase recurs throughout Jaar's practice, this marks the first time the phrase appears in Japanese in one of Jaar's works.