National Museum of Western ArtUeno Park
Turner: Painting the Sublime, in Dialogue with Contemporary Art
A special exhibition placing J.M.W. Turner's work in dialogue with contemporary art, exploring the sublime in landscape and light.
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Turner's Mer de Glace hangs beside Olafur Eliasson's glacier photographs, 30 pairs shot in 1999 and 2019. That pairing is the idea of the whole show: more than 80 works from London's Tate, with Turner's seascapes, Venetian light studies and Alpine avalanches set against modern and contemporary artists.
You start in a dim room, as visitors to Turner's own gallery did, so your eyes adjust before his moonlit watercolours and eclipse sketches. Seven chapters follow, through the Alps, Venice and rough seas, ending on late Turner beside Rothko and Barnett Newman. Cornelia Parker's piece is made from the canvas edges and linings taken off Turner's paintings: the bag of pan no mimi at the bakery, Tate edition.
Tickets are 2,400 yen, or 2,200 yen in advance, and it's open until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays. Your ticket covers the collection galleries that day until 12 January, then gives a free pass for their reopening on 20 March. The audio guide rents for 700 yen, cash only.
Editor's pick
Turner's glacier sketches hang opposite Olafur Eliasson's photographs of the same ice sheets melting. More than 80 works from Tate set Turner's avalanches and late, near-abstract light studies against Rothko, Katie Paterson and the Otolith Group.
Look for
Avalanche in the Grisons
Look for the snow itself filling the canvas in this 1810 oil: Turner put no human figure anywhere in it.
Katie Paterson's Totality
In the dark opening room, a sphere of 10,000 mirrored tiles, each engraved with a total solar eclipse, sends specks of light drifting slowly around Turner's moonlit watercolours.
Turner's Mer de Glace beside Eliasson
Turner's Alpine glacier hangs next to Olafur Eliasson's 30 pairs of glacier photographs, each taken in 1999 and again in 2019.
Cornelia Parker's Room for the Margins
Made from the canvas linings and margins removed from Turner's paintings, it sits in the history-painting chapter, which also holds his Bacchus and Ariadne of 1840.
Late Turner next to Rothko
Near-abstract studies of pure atmospheric light share a space with Rothko's colour fields.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- First-Timers
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want Turner alone: every chapter pairs him with post-war and contemporary art.
With kids
Admission is free for junior high school students and under; high school students pay 1,100 yen.
Also at National Museum of Western Art
- Picturing the Theater: From Delacroix and Daumier to Toulouse-Lautrec and Klinger20 October 2026 – 11 January 2027
- "Shōwa 100th": How Conservation and Restoration Evolved at the NMWA during the Shōwa Period — Van Gogh's Roses and Renoir's Woman with a Hat30 June 2026 – 11 January 2027
- Matisse: The Poetry of Black and White20 March 2027 – 19 July 2027
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Image credits
5
- Colorful Asia: Journey through Asia at Tokyo National MuseumCourtesy of Tokyo National Museum
- National Museum of Western ArtJoyofmuseums, CC BY-SA 4.0
- National Museum of Nature and ScienceDaderot, CC0
- Tokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumJoe Mabel, CC BY-SA 2.0
- Tokyo National MuseumWiiii, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0