Čiurlionis Cosmic Visions

The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo will devote spring 2026 to M. K. Čiurlionis with the exhibition The Inner Constellation, bringing together around eighty works including paintings and graphic pieces from the museum in Kaunas and other collections. The show marks the artist’s return to Japan thirty-three years after the major 1992 retrospective and coincides with the 150th anniversary of his birth. A singular figure bridging painting and music, Čiurlionis is known for seeking a language that could unite sound, image, and the spiritual dimension, developing a symbolist universe infused with cosmic visions, dreamlike atmospheres, and a strong sense of inwardness. The exhibition aims to convey this dual creative identity by highlighting how his canvases resonate with musical echoes and harmonies that transform the act of viewing into a multisensory journey. The display emphasizes the artist’s ability to translate harmonies and counterpoints into images, to give pictorial form to inner constellations in which time and space expand. Created within an extremely brief life span, his works reveal an expressive density that made Čiurlionis a cult figure in early twentieth-century European art and today bring him back into dialogue with an international audience. The Inner Constellation thus becomes a rare opportunity to explore the imagination of an artist who, through the fusion of music and painting, opened new perspectives on the relationship between art and the universe, inviting us to contemplate not only the visible but also the invisible dimensions it contains.