CURA.

Kazuko Miyamoto’s exhibition, curated by Eva Fabbris, is an expression of a broad and transversal look at recent art history and the intention to shed light on stories that are still poorly known within it.

Since the early 1970s, Miyamoto has been working between two continents and two cultures, finding a very personal way of connecting their deepest instances, contributing to and at the same time contravening modernist language. She has also been a promoter of activist and exhibition contexts that were the first in New York to extend the boundaries of representation for female and non-Western artists. The narrative of this attitude finds immediate responses in the most current instances in art today. Thus, this exhibition accompanies Madre’s audiences in recognizing narrative and historiographical paradigms that integrate and expand the gaze on the art of our immediate past according to a wholly contemporary sensibility. 

In this perspective, at Madre Miyamoto ideally dialogues with the museum’s Permanent Collection, particularly -given the amicable and linguistic contiguity between the two artists- with 10,000 Lines (2005) by Sol LeWitt (Hartford, 1928-New York, 2007).

Large space is reserved for string constructions, her most famous series of string sculptures, rigorous and striking two- and three-dimensional compositions begun in the early 1970s. Through a system of dense parallel lines made of an extremely light and modest material, these works present themselves as an ephemeral yet effective point of contact between architecture and the body, urging perception to pick up vibrations and inaccuracies. In these works, the minimalist language, pioneered by Miyamoto in dialogue with LeWitt, whose assistant she became shortly after moving to New York in the 1960s, is declined in a form that over the years gradually becomes more tactile and irregular, reacting convincingly and joyfully to grid structures and regular rhythms. Beginning with this initial series, the exhibition recounts the evolution of the practice and references that the artist drew on in the following decades: from graphic works and drawings related to string constructions to works made with direct print or photocopy, which testify to the artist’s attention to the ephemeral dimension of sculpture.

These and other works from the early 1980s arise from observation of and interaction with the street life of Downtown New York, where the artist has lived and worked since her arrival in the United States, and where she met and dialogued with artists, poets, and musicians: a lively and engaged scene, evoked in the exhibition with vivid visual documents. In the performances, presented at Madre through videos and archival photographs, the increasingly evident attitude toward the interweaving of art and experience is linked to a recovery of the memory of Japanese dance and tradition, evidenced also by the presence of some artist’s kimonos made by Miyamoto herself. Some important installations from the 2000s complete the itinerary.