Yukinori Yanagi
ICARUS
Pirelli HangarBicocca
Milan

Yukinori Yanagi is an artist who demonstrates the slippery complexity of symbols and other iconic images. His diptych Atomic Clouds over Ground Zero (2024) presents two large cyanotypes made from photographs of the mushroom cloud caused by the detonation of a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. One photograph is taken from the ground, the other from the sky, both blown up so that they tower over the room, restaging the two photographers’ very different viewpoints—the former elicits pathos, the latter implicates. Meanwhile, the cyanotype’s blue-and-white finish could be hot or cold, evoking either (pacifistic) fine weather or (pessimistic) “nuclear winter.” Although not explicitly mentioned, Yanagi’s retrospective “ICARUS” at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca—comprising a sequence of monumental, site-specific re-adaptations of installations from the past four decades—could be one of the few institutional exhibitions in Europe that came close to acknowledging the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.