Funny Face,

1976–77

Here, a rounded pinkish piece of marble is slotted through an ovular white marble disk. The title of the work suggests that these interlocking marble pieces resemble a funny face, possibly a smile with a protruding tongue. Viewed from another angle, however, the sculpture becomes a meditation on the delicate balance of two forms—a plane and a volume, a shape and a line. The reflective black marble plinth elicits contemplation of a duality as well, mirroring the stone balanced on its surface in reverse and confounding the division between the sculpture and its base. Throughout his long career Noguchi periodically returned to the lyrical style of abstract sculpture with biomorphic forms that he developed as an apprentice in the Paris studio of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi between 1927 and 1929.