TOKYO, HONG KONG
Phillips, 9 – 31 July 2025
Phillips is pleased to present Thierry Noir: Rush Hour, an expansive dual-city showcase of works by renowned French artist Thierry Noir in Tokyo and Hong Kong. Marking the artist’s most significant project in Asia to date, this selling exhibition draws a bold arc from the raw urgency of his early 1980s works to the vibrant, large-scale pieces of his contemporary practice. Encompassing over 40 years of artistic evolution, Thierry Noir: Rush Hour juxtaposes rarely seen early 1980s works—many never before exhibited or shown outside Europe—with a series of new paintings and site-specific murals created exclusively for this project.
TOKYO
Showing at Phillips Tokyo in the Piramide Building in Roppongi from 9–31 July, visitors will encounter an immersive installation featuring floor-to-ceiling murals hand painted in situ by Noir and all-new paintings from the Rush Hour series. Conceived as a dynamic collision of past and present, the installation immerses viewers in the artist’s signature visual language of bold outlines, vivid colour, and stylised characters arranged in interlocking compositions to reflect the breakneck speed, density, and non-stop motion of Tokyo as a modern metropolis. As a reflective counterpoint, visitors in Tokyo can also view smaller scale drawings on paper created in the shadow of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s.
“Rush Hour is about the intensity of now, about living in a constant state of motion. But it’s also about how that intensity connects back to the urgency I felt painting the Berlin Wall. Many years later, the same energy is still there, just transformed.” – Thierry Noir
HONG KONG
In Hong Kong’s Phillips’ Asia headquarters in West Kowloon, Thierry Noir: Rush Hour continues with an additional focus upon the continuities between Noir’s 1980s works and his modern-day practice. Tiny early works portraying Noir’s now iconic heads and other familiar compositions are presented for the first time in dialogue with large scale 2025 paintings. The juxtaposition of past and present serves to illustrate how Noir’s recurring motifs have evolved through time, but also how they remain forever rooted in his enduring visual vocabulary, establishing a singular artistic vision.
