Kazuko Miyamoto: String Constructions

“String Constructions” is the first institutional solo presentation in Germany dedicated to the work of Kazuko Miyamoto, a leading figure of the Post-Minimal and feminist movements in New York, where she has lived since 1964. In her sculptures, installations, performances, and works on paper, Miyamoto explores the body’s relationship to space, materiality, and the politics of labour and display.

The exhibition focuses on Miyamoto’s seminal “String Construction” series from the 1970s and 1980s and is the largest collective display of these sculptures to date. Comprising two- and three-dimensional compositions of string, nails, and drawn lines, the installations interlace notions of the collective, the performative, and the ephemeral within their conceptual framework.

Spread across the first, second, and third floors of KW, as well as its courtyard, “String Constructions” traces the shifts in Miyamoto’s approach to space, the body, and performance. Guided by the temporal dimension in the artist’s work, several of her influential sculptural arrangements are recreated and on view here for the first time since their debut. The exhibition brings together string constructions the artist creates in dialogue with the key sites of her career on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, reuniting them in their original constellations to form pockets of time and space.