Image: National Museum of Art, Osaka
The National Museum of Art, Osaka will open 'Collection 1: Self/Action' on July 19 as a prelude to its 50th anniversary year. The special collection exhibition runs through November 3 in the museum’s B2 floor galleries and draws on holdings that trace art up to the mid-1960s. According to the museum, the show presents around 140 works by more than 80 artists.
The museum, founded in 1977 after inheriting the former Expo ’70 Festival Plaza museum in Osaka Prefecture’s Expo Commemoration Park, moved to its current Nakanoshima building in 2004. The 2026 collection programme is being split into two parts ahead of the institution’s 50th anniversary in 2027, with this first instalment revisiting developments in art through works in the collection. The exhibition is organised by the National Museum of Art, Osaka and is supported by the Daikin Industries Foundation for Contemporary Art.
'Collection 1: Self/Action' focuses on the emergence and shifts of the artistic 'self' and on changing ideas around artistic 'action'. The museum frames the exhibition as a look back from its founding year to earlier artistic movements, using works made from the 1890s onward to consider how modern and contemporary art evolved across several decades. The display begins with Paul Cézanne’s works from around the 1890s and extends to pieces from the mid-1960s.
Artists listed for the exhibition include Paul Cézanne, Vasily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Jean or Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Taro Okamoto-era Japanese and international contemporaries such as Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Tetsumi Kudo, Takamatsu Jiro, and Takehisa Kosugi, among many others. The museum notes that the lineup may change.
The collection also includes works by artists associated with postwar experimentation and gestural practice, among them Shozo Shimamoto, Genichiro Inokuma, Sadamasa Motonaga, and Michio Yasutake, alongside figures such as Ruth Asawa, Cy Twombly, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Yves Klein’s contemporaries and successors represented in the museum’s holdings. Specific works highlighted on the museum page include Cézanne’s 'Preparation for a Banquet', Atsuko Tanaka’s 'Hell Gate', Kazuo Shiraga’s 'Tenyo Bosatsu', and Ruth Asawa’s untitled wire work from around 1965.
The exhibition will be open daily from 10:00 to 17:00, with Friday hours extended to 20:00. The museum will be closed on Mondays except July 20, September 21, October 12 and November 2, and also on July 21, September 24 and October 13. Admission is 430 yen for adults and 130 yen for university students, with free entry for high school students and younger, visitors under 18, and those aged 65 and over with identification.
