Susan Te Kahurangi King

ICA Miami presents the first museum exhibition of the work of self-taught New Zealand artist Susan Te Kahurangi King. Since early childhood, King has made drawings composed of undulating lines of bold color, refined rendering, and energetic relationships between appropriated cartoon characters, many of which predate pop art.

Curated by Tina Kukielski, independent curator and Executive Director of ART21, the exhibition includes approximately 60 works, many of which are on view for the first time. The exhibition surveys the various periods of King’s work from the foundational childhood drawings, to notebooks, to her mature work of the 1970s and ‘80s. It also includes King’s work since 2008, following a nearly twenty-year dormant period, in which the artist’s practice goes beyond representational content with an exploration of organic abstraction. Through the coupling of the artist’s early mature work and her more recent meditations on line and color, King’s decades of artistry—entirely self-taught—have arrived out of an open-ended process of looking. Taken together, the wondrous and unique encyclopedia of images conceived by King demonstrates her singular voice.

A monographic catalogue published by Lucia|Marquand will feature essays by Tina Kukielski and Gary Panter, as well as a contribution by artist Amy Sillman and foreword by Alex Gartenfeld. King was recently the subject of the 2012 documentary, “Susan’s Pictures.”