Heirloom

For her first exhibition with Lisson in New York, Kelly Akashi presents Heirloom, a new body of work that builds on her pivotal 2025 presentation in Los Angeles. Where that earlier exhibition examined inheritance through formal and material tension, Heirloom turns toward the conditions of loss and grief, asking how absence is held, transmitted, and given form. The exhibition coincides with Akashi’s participation in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and precedes the unveiling of her commission for John F. Kennedy International Airport’s New Terminal One, in partnership with Lead Curator, Culture Corps.

Across bronze, Corten steel, flame-worked glass, and carved stone, Akashi approaches sculpture as a site where loss can be registered without resolution. These materials do not conceal rupture but sustain it, allowing traces of erosion, oxidation, and transformation to remain visible. Form is subject to ongoing processes of change through which matter records duration. In this sense, the works operate as accumulations of time, where loss is not an isolated event but a condition that unfolds, settles, and alters.