• LOCATION

    TOKYO
    4th Floor, Piramide Building,
    6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku,
    Tokyo 106-0032 (map)


    HONG KONG
    G/F, WKCDA Tower
    West Kowloon Cultural District
    No. 8 Austin Road West
    Hong Kong (map)

  • VIEWING

    TOKYO
    July 9–31, Monday to Friday,
    11am–6pm
    (Closed on weekends)


    HONG KONG
    July 9–31, Monday to Friday,
    10am–6pm
    (Closed on weekends)

  • CONTACT

    Takako Nagasawa
    Senior International Specialist
    Modern & Contemporary
    Art Department
    tnagasawa@phillips.com

Exhibition Highlights

PhillipsX is pleased to present Thierry Noir: Rush Hour, an expansive dual-city showcase
of works by renowned French artist Thierry Noir. 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.

THIERRY NOIR The start toward a rapid solution, 2025

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.

THIERRY NOIR Mount Fuji has an aura of grace that comforts me, 2025

“Rush Hour is about the intensity of now, about living in a constant state of motion,” says Thierry Noir. “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 at The Berlin Wall in 1986

Thierry Noir Studio

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.

THIERRY NOIR An intense exchange after a short business meeting, 2025 (left) with and Early 1980s drawing (right)



Thierry Noir (b. 1958) first emerged in the 1980s as a politically engaged artist working in exile-like conditions in West Berlin and living in unofficial accommodation. His now iconic visual motifs of elongated profiles, flattened faces and simplified forms originated across large spans of the Berlin Wall as symbols of resistance and endurance. Today, Noir’s vividly colorful imagery is widely renowned throughout the world and with a career spanning five decades, Noir remains a tireless creator, continually expanding his visual universe.

Thierry Noir portrait (2023)

Thierry Noir Studio

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