Kelly Akashi

The essence of Kelly Akashi's practice lies in exploring the material's tactile qualities, including its potential, constraints, and ability to undergo transformation.

Biography of Kelly Akashi

Kelly Akashi was born in Los Angeles, California, where she resides and works. She earned her BFA from Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles in 2006, with additional studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main. In 2014, she obtained an MFA from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 

Akashi has received the 2022 LACMA Art + Technology Grant and the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize. 

Kelly Akashi's solo exhibitions include "Encounters" at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (2023), "Infinite Body" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York (2023), "Life Forms" at Barbati Gallery in Venice (2022), and many more.

She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including "Concerning Nature" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York (2023), "Durian on the Skin" at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles (2022), "Fauna" at Galerie Maria Bernheim in London (2021), among others. 

Kelly Akashi's work is included in the permanent collections of several institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the CC Foundation in Shanghai, the X Museum in Beijing, and others.

Kelly Akashi's Art Style

Kelly Akashi's artistic expression, characterized by adept manual craftsmanship and profound material insight, underscores the transient nature of the natural realm, capturing and cataloging fragmented moments in time. 

Initially educated in analog photography, traditional processes and the materiality of documents remain a driving force behind Kelly Akashi's sculptural investigations. Employing an array of media including wax, bronze, fire, glass, silicone, copper, and rope, Akashi delves into the capabilities and limitations of these materials, pushing the boundaries to both construct and question conventional notions of form.  

The recurring motif of the hand symbolizes Akashi's ongoing exploration of the temporality inherent in the human experience. Often rendered in bronze or crystal, her hands bear the visible imprints of time, from the growth of fingernails to the aging of flesh. Through towering sculpted weeds, delicately crafted glass flowers, a life-sized depiction of her body in polished travertine, and enlarged casts of extinct species of shells, Akashi poetically and objectively evokes the concept of mortality in a ritualistic assembly of objects.