Kazuko Miyamoto

On view from 6th July to 9th October 2023, the exhibition will be the first historiographic survey dedicated to Miyamoto by a European public institution. The exhibition will take place between the second and third floors of the historic Palazzo Donnaregina, tracing the different phases and numerous media through which the artist’s practice developed from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

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 little known within it.

Since the early 1970s, Miyamoto has straddled two countries and two cultures, finding a very personal way of connecting their deepest essences, both contributing to and contradicting the modernist language. She was also an activist and promoter of exhibition contexts which were the first in New York that extended the boundaries of representation for both female and non-Western artists. The account of this aptitude finds immediate resonance today in the most pressing instances of art. Therefore, this exhibition accompanies Madre’s audiences in the acknowledgment of narrative and historiographical paradigms that integrate and broaden their view of art from our immediate past on the basis of a wholly contemporary sensibility.
In this perspective, Miyamoto ideally dialogues with the works of the museum’s permanent collection, particularly—given the friendly relationship and affinity of language between the two artists—with 10,000 Lines (2005) by Sol LeWitt (b. 1928, Hartford, 1928; d. 2007 New York).

A large area is devoted to string constructions, her most renowned series of twine sculptures: rigorous and evocative two- and three-dimensional compositions first undertaken in the 1970s. Through a system of dense parallel lines, made of an extremely light and modest material, these works are revealed as an ephemeral yet effective point of contact between architecture and the body, encouraging one’s perception to pick up on vibrations and imprecisions. The minimalist language experimented by Miyamoto in dialogue with Sol LeWitt, with whom she worked as an assistant shortly after she moved to New York in the 1960s, is indeed outlined in these works in a form that becomes gradually more tactile and irregular over the years, reacting more and more convincingly and joyfully to grid structures and regular rhythms. Starting from this initial series of works, the exhibition recounts the evolution of the artist’s practice and references over the following decades: from the graphic works and drawings related to string constructions to works made with direct print or photocopy, testifying to the attention paid to the more ephemeral dimension of sculpture.