Kazuko Miyamoto

String Constructions, 117 Hester Street, 1972-73

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EXILE is pleased to present a research presentation of early String Constructions by Kazuko Miyamoto in Berlin.

The three exhibited String Constructions were last installed in 1972-73 in Miyamoto’s studio building at 117 Hester Street, New York. The presentation focuses on Miyamoto’s pivotal transition from the pictorial plane to these early wall-based spatial constructions, with the aim of further exploring Miyamoto’s creative evolution towards her distinctive and expansive artistic practice.

After a brief period of painting (1969-1972), Miyamoto turned to the creation of these ephemeral, wall-based works using only industrial nails and readily available cotton string. These early works are in many ways transitional, and their relationship to Minimalism as experienced through her (predominantly male) peers contrasts her later presentations as a member of the women’s art collective A.I.R..

The specific identity and conservation of the works on display will be explored between their understanding as an extended form of painting and as site-specific architectural intervention.

→Kazuko Miyamoto

→Kazuko Miyamoto, String Constructions, KW Berlin, opening Oct 18, 2025

MIART, Milan

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EXILE returns to MIART with a presentation of works by Kazuko Miyamoto, born 1942, Gwenn Thomas, born 1943, Brishty Alam, born 1988, and David Gruber born 1989.

In her move from painting to early string construction work, Kazuko Miyamoto replaced the confined space of the canvas for the architectural  expanse of her studio wall at 117 Hester Street. This move transformed the inconspicuous brick from a motif, as in the painting Progression of Rectangles (1969), into a site of measurement, structure, and spatial intervention. The visual field, in its immediacy and transparency, harbours a complexity that tends to spill from under its allocated borders or limits. The presentation expands on this very quality.

David Gruber’s paintings oscillate between the tactile immediacy of the microphone and the abstract detachment of material landscapes, employing pigment and composition to effect a kind of alchemical transmutation—rendering the familiar intangible.

A similar convergence of media occurs in the photographic practice of Gwenn Thomas, where the chemical processes intrinsic to photography extend the perceptual capacities traditionally associated with painting.

Whereas Brishty Alam furthers this trajectory through sculpture, translating the painterly surface into synthetic polystyrene forms that assert a presence at once corporeal and otherworldly. In each case, the painterly fails to remain a fixed category and is treated as a mutable field—expanded, translated, and reconfigured across material, spatial, and conceptual registers.

→Kazuko Miyamoto

→Gwenn Thomas

→Brishty Alam

→David Gruber

Works from Suitcases

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Concurrent to Kazuko Miyamoto’s retrospective exhibition on view at Belvedere 21 in Vienna until March 2025, Works from Suitcases presents a first, introductory insight into the creative exchange initiated by Kazuko Miyamoto in New York, and Paul Fischnaller in Linz, Austria. From the mid 1980s, Miyamoto’s loft, her community art space Gallery Onetwentyeight, and Fischnaller’s alternative art space Hofkabinett provided the locations for a flourishing artist exchange. Works from Suitcases takes its title from the eponymous exhibition held at Hofkabinett in 1987 and focuses on the initial exchanges until 1990. Rarely, or even previously unseen artworks by Austrian artists Peter Hauenschild, Karl-Heinz Klopf, Ilona Pachler, and Othmar Zechyr are exhibited alongside video documentation by Markus Fischer as well as a music video by the Austrian pop band Die Mollies. A collection of recently uncovered mid 1980s slides taken by Miyamoto of the Lower East Side give an insight into time and location.

While being the unrivalled centre of the commercial art world, downtown Manhattan and especially the Lower East Side provided space for an immense variety of alternative creative venues ranging from the infamous CBGB, where Die Mollies performed in 1987, to art spaces such as ABC No Rio, No Se No, and from 1986, Miyamoto’s own Gallery onetwentyeight. Some of the exhibited works are by, or in reference to, the Rivington School, an alternative artist group founded in 1983. Predominantly involved in immersive social practices such as large-scale, waste-metal sculpture, performance or street painting the Rivington School fostered an artistic practice beyond the limitations of the white cube and deliberately integrated itself into the local neighbourhood. 

It is no coincidence that Miyamoto opened her own art space in 1986 on 128 Rivington Street. Here, she supported not only members of the Rivington School through numerous exhibitions but was able to envision and create her very own, inclusive artistic universe. Being a historically diverse and immigrant-based neighbourhood, Miyamoto identified her own biography, having moved from Tokyo to New York in 1964, with the identity of the Lower East Side and integrated its specifics into numerous of her artworks, some of which, such as the 6 o’clock Kimono are on display in this exhibition with other examples concurrently on display at Belvedere 21. Likewise, some of the exhibited works by Austrian artists were inspired either by Miyamoto’s practice or by other local creative movements.

At the same time in Linz, an alternative art world existed beyond the institutional and often exclusive one found in Austria’s capital Vienna. Artist-to-artist movements, spaces for experimentation and self-organised initiatives paralleled the developments in the Lower East Side, with Fischnaller’s art space Hofkabinett and Miyamoto’s Gallery onetwentyeight sharing many characteristics. Returning to Linz, Miyamoto might have enjoyed the consistency of the artist environment as her own home drastically gentrified becoming financially as well as creatively increasingly inaccessible to expanded creative visions.  

Works from Suitcases gives an initial insight into the activities and results of the early years of this artist exchange between New York and Linz. The exhibition and its set-up should be seen as a tribute to self-organised artist activism and celebrate expanded ideas of creative practice beyond commercial or institutional filtration.

 

Participating artists:

Austrian filmmaker Markus Fischer accompanied Die Mollies to New York in 1987 and filmed video interviews as well as the music video of Hot Love all of which are included in this exhibition.

Paul Fischnaller has been working in the Linz-based art space Hofkabinett since 1982. In 1987 he organised an exhibition of Linz-based artists at Gallery onetwenteight in New York. He is a member of a rock band Die Mollies. 

Peter Hauenschild graduated from Hochschule für künstlerische und industrielle Gestaltung, Linz in 1987. Consequently, he traveled to New York where he stayed with Miyamoto. His work is predominantly based in painting and drawing. As part of the exhibition a set of drawings created in New York and shortly thereafter are on display.

Austrian artist and filmmaker Karl-Heinz Klopf graduated from Hochschule für künstlerische und industrielle Gestaltung, Linz in 1982. During his stay with Miyamoto in 1987 he created a set of miniature works entitled Works for a Suitcase that are included in this exhibition.  

Kazuko Miyamoto, is a New York based artist whose practice emerged from minimalist influences of the 1970s upon which she expanded her oevre across multiple disciplines. Since 1986 she is directing the alternative art space Gallery onetwentyeight in New York. Concurrently to this exhibition Miyamoto is awarded with a retrospective solo exhibition on view at Belvedere 21 in Vienna.

Ilona Pachler graduated from Hochschule für künstlerische und industrielle Gestaltung, Linz in 1981 and consequently moved to New York. She has been engaged with the work of Miyamoto ever since and in 2020 became the artist’s archivist. She is a conceptual artist, living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. An unrealised exhibition proposal from 1990 is on display as part of the exhibition. 

Othmar Zeychr studied at the Staatsgewerbeschule, Linz from 1952-53. He predominantly worked with etching or ink on paper. Initiated by Miyamoto, he exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York  in 1987. Two ink drawings from the exhibition are on display in this exhibition. 

Rivington School was an alternative artist movement that emerged from the East Village art scene in the 1980s in New York City. The group started in 1983 and named themselves after an abandoned public school house building located on Rivington Street. Their practice focused on street performance, graffiti and large-scale public sculptures.

Die Mollies are a Linz-based music band founded in 1977 that in 1987 performed at CDBG during their stay with Miyamoto in New York. The screened music video of Hot Love was partially filmed on Miyamoto’s roof top.

→Gallery Onetwentyeight

→Hofkabinett

→Kazuko Miyamoto at Belvedere 21 (until March 2, 2025)

ARTISSIMA, Turin

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EXILE is pleased to announce a dialogue presentation of works by Kazuko Miyamoto and Kerstin von Gabain for this year’s ARTISSIMA artfair.

The dialogue between the artists touches on the ephemeral quality of structure; be it the ephemeral quality of power structures and the means of countering them, as with Monument (2023) by Kerstin von Gabain, or the ephemeral quality of material structure, the structure of space, as in the case of Kazuko Miyamoto’s Untitled (1979). The stability and firmness of the works are achieved with delicate, readily available materials, paper and string, respectively, as well as with manual, tactile and attentive, means of construction. Structure stands in close connection with continuity and permanence, both of which tend to be questioned in times of societal division and change.

As monuments reenter public discourse, raising the question, what role should a monument play in contemporary society, and whether its symbolic ties to the powers that be should be upheld or severed, monumentality (both in toughness and in scale) becomes a subject of contention.

Kerstin von Gabain’s paper miniatures contrast the grandeur of large figures or busts and the permanence of their stone or metals. Monumentality is replaced by non-monumentality, proposing anti-monumentality. Kazuko Miyamoto, on the other hand, challenges the analytical side to minimalism and its aesthetic vocabulary, constructing spatial structures that seem ever more embodied. Last exhibited as part of the exhibition A Great Big Drawing Show curated by Alanna Heiss at P.S.1. (now MoMA PS1) in 1979, the string construction echoes the artist’s move to incorporate dimensions of her body into intricate patterning of nail and string prominent in her work from the early 1970s onward.

Their joint presentation focuses on withdrawn conceptual and aesthetic gestures that through subtlety and programmatic attention to detail reach pointed and engaged artistic expressions.

Walder

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In Romanticism, the forest serves as a timeless refuge from the modern world. The group exhibition Walder assumes that the forest is no longer an antipode, but the dominant reality. Ingo Niermann and Erik Niedling’s video of the same title shows a lonely middle-aged man strolling through the Thuringian woods, imagining himself as the law, the power and the people. This work is complemented by paintings, drawings, photographs and artefacts, also by Fabian Reetz, Genesis P. Orridge, Kazuko Miyamoto, Kinga Kiełczyńska and Thomas Bayrle, in which the word for world is again forest.

→EXILE Erfurt, Kartausengarten 6, 99084 Erfurt, Germany

Das stille Leben des Sammlers Kempinski

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You are cordially invited to the inaugural Private Viewing of the imaginary collection of Mr Kempinski. This exhibition brings together works by over 60 artists, now presented for the very first time for collective viewing.

New York-based curator Mr Miller and Berlin-based Mr Siekmeier were asked by Mr. Kempinski to create a collage of artworks that reflects upon the relationship between art and collecting.

The Kempinski collection is by definition fluctuant and can move freely from one context to the next.

Exhibition events:

Sat, May 31, 7pm
Kinga Kielczynska: Power point lecture introducing
ARP- Art Related Progress. A business proposal for an art residency program to be set up in Colombia on a self-sustainable property

Sat, June 7, 7pm
Film screening with curator Billy Miller

Fri, June 13, 7pm
Martin Kohout: One-year anniversary of Kohout’s Gotthard Tunnel Run in Switzerland during LISTE Basel in 2013 and artist booklaunch

Participating Artists: Nadja Abt, Aggtelek, Joseph Akel, Peggy Ahwesh, Anonymous, Francisco Berna, Douglas Boatwright, Matt Borruso, Matthew Burcaw, Elijah Burgher, Luke Butler, Anders Clausen, TM Davy, Mark Dilks, Discoteca Flaming Star, Paul Gabrielli, Robin Graubard, Markus Guschelbauer, Frank Hauschildt &Valentin Hertweck, Adrian Hermanides, Dan Herschlein, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Monika Paulina Jagoda, Stephan Jung, Vytautas Jurevicius, Renata Kaminska, Saman Kamyab, Kinga Kiełczyńska, Lisa Kirk, Martin Kohout, Marcus Knupp, Ulrich Lamsfuss, Cary Leibowitz, Hanne Lippard, Mahony, Katharina Marszewski, Darrin Martin, Rachel Mason, Howard McCalebb, Kazuko Miyamoto, Bob Mizer, Erik Niedling, Hugh O’Rourke, Joel Otterson, Rob Pruitt, Johannes Paul Raether, Annika Rixen, Matteusz Sadowski, Salvor, Dean Sameshima, Pietro Sanguineti, Fette Sans, Wilken Schade, Jason Seder, Barbara Sullivan, Gwenn Thomas, Goran Tomcic , Rein Vollenga, Jan Wandrag, Fresh White, Tara White, Norbert Witzgall, Carrie Yamaoka

 

May the bridges I burn light the way

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to invite you to our ten-year anniversary exhibition entitled May the bridges I burn light the way.

Is a gallery anniversary dedicated to commemorate a space, a brand or artists the gallery has worked with? In the case of EXILE, founded on Oct 18, 2008 in a small courtyard in Berlin-Kreuzberg, the commemoration is to the way EXILE has been aiming to build communities. Over the last 10 years, EXILE has initiated various formats to expand and democratize access to the exhibition space. A yearly exhibition entitled Summer Camp (2009-2011) was based on an open-call for creative proposals, while Irregular Readings (2013 & 2016) focused on immaterial creative actions. Both formats have the same core principle: to initiate a collective experience, ignite dialogue and create community.

Departing from this May the bridges I burn light the way takes the definition of community into a polyphonic level. The exhibition starts as an extension of EXILE’s participation in the Manifesta 12 collateral program called 5x5x5, and runs parallel to the launch of the second issue of the street newspaper Arts the Working Class; all of them carrying the same title: May the bridges I burn light the way.

EXILE X Summer camp May the bridges I burn light the way: As a title, it implies a certain pessimism; anticipating the worst outcomes from a given situation. However, it reveals also the unfortunate desire to (always) be right. Thus the final exhibition in the gallery’s Berlin space looks at both ends of the revolutionary act: the will to conquer utopia and the urge to provoke dystopia. May the bridges I burn light the way has been conceived with the purpose to create a dialogue between social activism, art practices and Berlin’s socio-cultural reality, responding to different examples of anarchistic behaviour.

The conceptual and aesthetic choices of the artists EXILE invited to join in this exhibition are examples of subtle gestures fostering a change for the definition of the artwork as an artifact to which the world can relate itself to:  A hanging mandala by Lauryn Youden, a painting of a dystopian private garden by Louise Thomas, an old neon lamp brought to expire in the gallery by Iris Touliatou, the embodiment of an invisible community by Raffaela Naldi Rossano, or an audio conversation piece about the end of the world placed in a car outside the gallery space by Ayami Awazuhara & Christopher Burman.

The main room of the gallery, whose windows look out to Kurfürstenstrasse, presents a composition of works that may take you through the doors of perception. Artworks confront themselves; cognition, concentration, hallucination and remembrance. The artworks engage as catapults to past events, obsessive memories and to lost and found images, useful to the questions of functionality, reproductivity and appropriation of the visual. Stream of consciousness is not only something you could put in words, like James Joyce once enacted as a creative act for the very first time with Ulysses, but in scrabbles and drawings, just like Heiner Franzen. Franzen’s motif of a human/animal floats in a state of constant mutation. Flashing details from movies or Franzen’s cartoonesque figures emerge in new forms and materiality. Thus, Franzen examines the removal of boundaries of his materials by constantly updating them. Every image is the reflection of another. 

Sarah Lehnerer, whose work navigates through methodological rigor and associative openness elaborates on social and historical connections through a drone video loop, a polaroid depicting herself on her knees, and a  plaster cast for which she squeezed the material with her legs. Her texts, images and objects defy the oppositions of reality and fiction, of objectivity and subjectivity. 

Playful, defiant, cautious, Kazuko Miyamoto portraits herself in the studio of the artist she worked for, Sol Lewitt. Naked, wearing a mask, the female body performs an experimental take, choreographing humorously what could be an innocent way of turning upside down the hierarchies, not only within LeWitt’s studio between the master and the apprentice, but as a formal separation from her interests from structuralism. So to speak, the self-portrait shows a goofy yet violent situation.

But it is the bold work of Maria Thereza Alves, which encircles the exhibition’s orbit, showing a moment of staged transcendentalism with the head of a hawk held by a masculine, strong hand covered in indigo color, ready to bury the death bird, ceremonially. Her ongoing body of work entitled Urban Rituals consists of a series of photographs taken throughout the years and in various countries of dead birds that Alves has encountered in the city or in the countryside. As an urban dweller with no communal rituals that would mark the death of these beings, Alves decided to create her own possibilities of remembering and honoring them.

EXILE X Summer camp May the bridges I burn light the way is, last but not least, a cordial invitation to join us once more and for us to say thanks to the community, for the support the gallery received in the last decade. As a next step, EXILE will reopen in September in a new space in Vienna.

Artists: Ayami Awazuhara & Christopher Burman, Carsten Höller, Club Fortuna, Heiner Franzen, Iris Touliatou, Kazuko Miyamoto, Lauryn Youden, Louise Thomas, Madison Bycroft, Maria Thereza Alves, Nschotschi Haslinger, Paulina Nolte, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Sarah Lehnerer, Zoë Claire Miller.

Text by María Inés Plaza Lazo. May the bridges I burn light the way is curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo and Christian Siekmeier.

Grotto Capitale

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But still, built into me was this button – when pressed, the button would save me. I don’t know if I was in charge of this button, or if someone somewhere praying for me was in charge of it. I would abandon myself, like when I took the super pill. I would return though, I would recover. Others stayed out there, in a lovely but remote place. (Grace Jones)

Grotto Capitale: Beatrice Balcou, Kathe Burkhart, Zuzanna Czebatul, Nschotschi Haslinger, Nona Inescu, Anna Jandt, Hanne Lippard, Katharina Marzewski, Kazuko Miyamoto, Chiara No, Nathalie Du Pasquier, and Pauł Sochacki

Features
→Art Viewer

 

Ausstellung 61

Posted on by Regina Regina

↑At
Aggtelek
↑Night
Christophe De Rohan Chabot
↑Creatures
Erik Niedling
↑Come
Gwenn Thomas
↑Up
Jordan Nassar
↑From
Kazuko Miyamoto
↑The
Martin Kohout
↑Bottom
Nathalie Du Pasquier
↑Of
Patrick Fabian Panetta
↑Our
TM Davy
↑Oceans

→Click here to watch exhibition trailer by Patrick Panetta

Features
→Art Viewer

Kazuko Miyamoto & Beatrice Balcou

Posted on by Regina Regina

The current exhibition at EXILE is both an intentional and intuitive dialogue between two artists from different generations, yet with a similar sense of observing the world in its formal and relational complexity.

The work of Kazuko Miyamoto, born 1942 in Japan, living and working in New York since the late 1960s, is represented by a single oversized Kimono levitating in the open space and, in a sense, overseeing the entirety of the exhibition. Its strong, yet partly translucent presence demonstrates the poignant element of Miyamoto’s minimalism-rooted artistic practice. It is in particular this combination of performance-based objects with the unspoken presence of the otherwise physically absent feminine body that continuously reverberates through the artist’s work.

Béatrice Balcou, born 1976 in France, living and working in Brussels, sets a series of small-scale sculptures entitled The K. Miyamoto Boxes in context to Miyamoto’s Giant Kimono. These are the result of a comprehensive, non-invasive research into the work of Kazuko Miyamoto. In her practice, Balcou pursues a poetic analysis of the established rules of production, distribution and consumption of artworks. Balcou states that in the existing art-exhibiting reality, certain artworks get exhibited regularly while many others remain hidden, which, to the artist, leads to a slow unnoticed death of these abandoned objects.

The K. Miyamoto Boxes have a strong formal similarity with Miyamoto’s original works but, presented as plain wooden miniatures, achieve their own referential identity. With many of the original artworks by Miyamoto destroyed, the visitor is invited to focus, if only for a moment, on the display of the objects. The attention is focused on the objects as their material entity with their physical presence being blurred between art-historical fact, memory and disappearance.

The exhibition continues with a set of works by Balcou entitled Placebo Prints. These represent yet another derivation of an art object she examines and, like the echo of the original work, resonate somewhere between the physical matter of the original and the circulation of its reproduction. Set in dialogue to these flat renderings of three-dimensional objects is Miyamoto’s Cardboard Box Painting, which shows various kimono, knife or boat shapes painted onto a regular cardboard box, returning a flat surface back to its three-dimensional state.

This exhibition project was produced and first exhibited in 2016 at →L’ISELP (Institut supérieur pour l’étude du langage plastique) in Brussels.

Features
→Art Viewer

 

Document Performance

Posted on by Regina Regina

The exhibition Document Performance presents objects by artists Awst & Walther, Claudia Kapp and Benjamin Blanke, FORT, Gwenn Thomas / Joan Jonas, Hermann Nitsch, Johannes Paul Raether, Kazuko Miyamoto, Martin Kohout and Stuart Brisley.

A performance is an action in time. A document of said performance is a physical manifestation of a previous action encapsulated in various material forms.

However, such objects are never merely just documenting their source performance, but are rather autonomous in and of themselves. While they refer back to the source they are neither the past performance itself nor its direct representation. Their temporal source is embedded in the permanent. This doubled relationship to time results in a contextual shift: From questions of What-has-been? and What-has-happened-since? to What-is-now? and, in some cases, to What-will-be?.

Document Performance investigates the autonomous life of the documents as they exist in the here and now. Their fragmented, though transitional relationship with the past, present and future fuels the viewer’s imagination: What does each document mean? How is the source performance embedded in the object? How did the document come into existence? Who is the author? How has the object’s context shifted? How has time transformed the document itself? What does the object mean to the viewer?

The objects featured in the exhibition follow no historical or contextual narrative. Each of them has been produced as a result, a consequence or a mindset of a performative action. Some documents on display are:

– The photograph by Gwenn Thomas of Joan Jonas during her performance Twilight in 1975. This photograph is identified by both artists as a collaborative work and asks about their individual identities, the nature of their collaboration and the photograph’s authorship and existence in relation to the performance.

– The film Being and Doing by Stuart Brisley (with Ken McMullen) features Brisley’s performances in the context of a 50-minute documentation that investigates the origins of performance art, connecting it not to modernism but to ancient folk rituals in England and Europe.

– The object from Johannes Paul Raether’s performance Nationalfahnen zu Schwefelrosen shows a small, burnt German flag. When burning such flags, Raether transformed each into a rose with a thorn. He combines one of the highest visually charged expressions of protest with the creation of a vernacular kitsch object.

– The first vinyl recording of Hermann Nitsch from his 1972 performance Akustisches Abreaktionsspiel is displayed on a record player, although it is so rare and precious that it can no longer be played. The viewer is forced to imagine the performance solely by looking at the vinyl record and employing his/her knowledge of Nitsch’s body of work.

– The printout of a diary of an anonymous participant in Claudia Kapp’s and Benjamin Blanke’s drug-withdrawal project Cold Turkey, presented at Kunstwerke in 2010, undermines almost all expectations of artistic practice, performance and document with one single piece of text.

– The fur umbrella by Kazuko Miyamoto has not been used as part of a performance yet. It has been produced by Miyamoto for an upcoming performance as part of her exhibition at EXILE in the late spring of 2012.

→Read Review: Artinfo

Fake

Posted on by Regina Regina

Fake is of unknown origin. It was first attested in criminal slang in London as an adjective in 1775, as a verb in 1812, as a noun in 1851 and as a person in 1888, though its origins are probably older. A likely source is feague from German fegen in colloquial use. Another source may be from Latin facere.

Fake is probably from feak, feague (“to give a better appearance through artificial means”); akin to Dutch veeg (“a slap”), vegen (“to sweep, wipe”); German fegen (“to sweep, to polish”). Compare Old English fācn, fācen (“deceit, fraud”). Perhaps related to Old Norse fjuka (“fade, vanquish, disappear”), feikn (“strange, scary, unnatural”) and Albanian fik (“put out, vanquish, disappear”).

Fake is a new browser for Mac OS X. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that can be run again and again without human interaction.

Fake is a song written and recorded by British soft rock group Simply Red. It was released in July 2003 as the second single from the album, Home. It was the next single after their international smash hit “Sunrise.” It reached number-one on the U.S. Billboard Hot Dance Club Play for the week of February 14, 2004.

Fake was a Swedish synthpop band during the 1980s.

Fake is an uncharted territory off the coast of Ko-Realia.

Fake was an exhibition at EXILE in Berlin.

 

Aggtelek
Benjamin Alexander Huseby
Billy Miller
Christophe De Rohan Chabot
Fox Irving and Kenneth Goldsmith
Fresh White
Hanne Lippard
Heji Shin
Jo-ey Tang
Julian Fickler
Jurgen Ostarhild
Kathe Burkhardt
Kazuko Miyamoto
Kinga Kielczynska
Mark Dilks
Martin Kohout
Nadja Abt
Nancy Davenport
Norbert Witzgall
Paul Sochacki
Patrick Fabian Panetta
Pietro Sanguineti
Rachel Mason
Rapture Inc.
Rein Vollenga
TOLE & Tolan
Ulrich Lamsfuss
Ulrich Wulff
Ursus Haussmann
Vytautas Jurevicius

String and Thread

Posted on by Regina Regina

Kazuko Miyamoto (born 1942) left Japan for New York in 1964. In 1969, she met the artist Sol LeWitt, with whom she engaged in a life-long creative and conceptual dialogue. The exhibition String and Thread begins with a particular period in the 1970’s when Miyamoto created a series of ephemeral constructions using only nails and string. Based on existing conceptual drawings and vintage photographs Miyamoto will re-create and re-interpret two of these String pieces specifically for this exhibition.

Central to her work has always been the notion of the line as a link between two points. In Miyamoto’s artistic career this line has evolved from being part of a geometric grid towards a more organically shaped object. In recent years Miyamoto explored elements of dance and performance based on ideas of improvisational music. String And Thread will show Miyamoto’s creative process through the decades and, with the inclusion of Wall Drawing 815, pay tribute and homage to Sol LeWitt.

In 1972 Miyamoto became a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, founded in 1972 as the first artist-run, not-for-profit gallery for women artists in the world. Here, she worked and exhibited together with artists such as Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta. In close work relationship with Sol LeWitt Miyamoto fabricated many of his sculptures in the past 39 years. In 1986 she established gallery onetwentyeight, the Lower East Side’s longest continuously running alternative art space.

Miyamoto has participated in countless national and international exhibitions in the past 40 years. To name a few: 55 Mercer Gallery, New York; Marilena Bonomo Gallery, Italy; Lodz Biennale, Poland; Neue Galerie Linz, Austria and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. In 2007 Miyamoto was selected for the Artist in Residence Program at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria. Her work is included in a wide selection of important public and private collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Starting on March 30th Miyamoto will use EXILE to create an installation of re-created and new works that will open to the public on April 18th. Many works in the exhibition have not been shown in public since their original construction.

Live End Dream No

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by artist Kazuko Miyamoto in the gallery. The exhibition is titled Live End Dream No after a 1975 drawing by Miyamoto and features recent recoveries from the archive of Miyamoto, including four exceptional paintings by the artist that have survived the time since creation in the attic of her small cottage in upstate New York.

This exhibitions further explores the magnitude and depth of Miyamoto’s artistic practice that juxtaposes minimal tactics with a very personal and individual handling of minimalist constraints.

 

Container

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present Container, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

In 1972, upon relocating from her studio in 117 Hester Street (Lower East Side, New York) combined with the urgency for personal freedom, Miyamoto developed a body of work that was small, modular and mobile; a reflection, perhaps, of her own nomadic situation. Utilizing this energy for producing artwork, she inevitably left traces of these events on objects that so closely resemble minimalist sculpture, yet adhere to her own particular visual language.

The center piece of the exhibition is the sculptural installation entitled Hatbox, 1975. Hatbox consists of equal volumes of hexagonal (6) and triangular (36) pieces of gold-painted sheetrock that, in its enclosed state, entirely fill the artist-made and painted box measuring 27 x 50 x 50 cm. In its expanded state, the dimensions of the sculpture depend on the installation by the artist or a person chosen by the artist.

With the same gestural method of “doing and undoing” that can be found in many of her works, such as her string constructions, the process of systematization is both composed and subsequently demolished by the artist’s interaction with the work itself.

Container will demonstrate Miyamoto’s playful reinvention of the rules of the minimalist language. In acknowledging the codes that have underlined minimal and conceptual art, she celebrates the spirited nature of chance and the inevitability of imprecision. The materials used keep their organic qualities while simultaneously adopting the familiar expressions of geometry. In doing so, Miyamoto welcomes an open reading and humanness that is so rarely attributed to works of such nature.

Concurrently the launch of Kazuko Miyamoto’s artist monograph will take place during the exhibition opening on April 19, 2013. As the first extensive catalog dedicated to her works, this limited edition publication features previously unpublished photographs and documentation as well as texts written by Marilena Bonomo, Luca Cerizza, Janet Passehl and Lawrence Alloway.

Kazuko Miyamoto will also participate in the exhibition Conceptual Tendencies II at the Daimler Kunstsammlung Berlin from April 18 to September 22, 2013. She will be exhibiting alongside Leonor Antunes, Wolfgang Berkowski, Klaus Jörres, Sol LeWitt, Brian O’Doherty, Sandra Peters, Stefan Römer, Fred Sandback, Anne Schneider, Uwe H. Seyl and Natalia Stachon.

A special section of the exhibition is devoted to Miyamoto and Sol LeWitt. This section will give an insight into the artists’ creative interactions. Amongst other works a string construction entitled Archway to Cellar by Miyamoto last shown at PS1 in 1978 will be shown alongside LeWitt’s only wall drawing made entirely out of string and nails (WD #815) as well as wall drawing #529 last executed by Miyamoto in her community art space, Gallery Onetwentyeight, in New York in 1987.

ARTISSIMA, Turin

Posted on by Regina Regina

Invited by the curatorial team of Artissima’s Back to the Future section, EXILE is pleased to announce the first solo presentation of the work of Kazuko Miyamoto as part of Artissima’s section Back to the Future.

Moving to New York from her native Japan at the age of 22 in 1964, Miyamoto quickly started working within the burgeoning minimalist scene of that time. Whilst closely interacting and observing the Minimalist movement Miyamoto developed her very own distinct artistic practice, a blend of her Japanese heritage and issues in minimalism, as well as her identity as a woman within this masculine dominated scene. Working across all media from painting to drawing, sculpture to video, performance to dance, Miyamoto has created a complex, though sadly underrated and partially unresearched oevre that deserves deeper appreciation and research.

In 1974, Miyamoto became a member of the women’s art collective A.I.R., building a collaborative platform upon which female artists could present their works to the public. Here, she has had her first solo exhibitions and curated various group exhibitions together with artists such as Ana Mendieta and especially Nancy Spero. Later, in 1982, becoming increasingly engaged in a collaborative and immersive practice, she founded Gallery OneTwentyEight, which, until today, operates out of its original location and is the longest artist-run, community art space in New York.

The works on display at Artissima focus on Miyamoto’s minimalist roots and their adaptation within her own unique practice. Issues of overarching structure and order become undermined by individuality, play and chance. As a starting point, the presentation begins with one of her few surviving early paintings Untitled (1972) in which Miyamoto paints an accurate grid upon which she uses spray-paint, a medium that often unstable and hard to control, resulting in a lose disarray of pattern. This painting has recently been on display as part of the exhibition Conceptual Tendencies at the Collection Daimler Contemporary in Berlin.

Her modular sculpture Hatbox (1975) functions as a transportable sculpture that introduces the  tension between order and play into the gallery space. Packed neatly into an hexagonal painted artist-made box, equal amounts of hexagonal and triangular forms made from gold spray-painted parts of sheet rock form a certain kind of game, solely to be played by the artist herself or other individuals authorized by the artist.

Her enlarged photocopy work wittly entitled Stunt (1982), a result of a private performative action in the artist’s studio, shows the artist herself naked doing a shoulder stand in front of an open cube sculpture by the artist Sol LeWitt, for whom she worked since 1968 and shares a life-long friendship and appreciation. This work brings Miyamoto’s practice rather distinctly to a focal point, critically addressing the problem of subordination of an artist’s individuality under a perceived rigid structure. At Artissima, this unique large photocopy piece is presented for the first time to the public since 1988.

Further works on display include a selection of smaller photocopy works that show Miyamoto’s personal examination of minimalist artistic practice in relationship to her own individuality. One of these, the four-part work Untiled (1988), consists of four repetitive photocopies of wooden cut-off pieces placed directly onto a copy machine that can be arranged freely without any given instructions creating open possibilities for interaction and display.

Miyamoto has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, amongst them: John Webber Gallery, Kunsthalle Krems, Marilena Bonomo and Allessandra Bonomo Gallery, 55 Mercer Gallery, Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. She has held three solo exhibitions at Exile Gallery and has recently exhibited as part of the exhibition Conceptual Tendencies at Daimler Contemporary Collection. For 2014 EXILE is proud to announce that Miyamoto was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Archive grant.

 

Additional event:

Friday, Nov 8, 6:30 pm, location: Artissima: Book Corner

String and Thread: A book launch of the first monograph dedicated to the artist and a slide introduction to the work of Kazuko Miyamoto by art critic and curator Luca Cerizza and gallerist Christian Siekmeier

The recently published monograph on the work of Miyamoto with texts by Luca Cerizza, Lawrence Alloway, Janet Passehl and Marilena Bonomo will be available at the booth and at the Liberia Luxemburg bookstore at Artissisma.

Kazuko Miyamoto & Florin Maxa: A Dialogue

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present the first presentation of works by Romanian-born artist Florin Maxa (born 1943) in New York. His works are set in dialogue with works by Japanese-born, New York-based artist Kazuko Miyamoto (born 1942). While their geographical, cultural and social biographies couldn’t be further apart, their works share an affinity that becomes first introduced through this exhibition.

The works on display, some of them have not been seen publicly since the time of their production, range from 1972 – 1980. Both artists have their roots in minimalist practice but increasingly extended their artistic vision towards a less conceptually-rigid, more free and personal expression.

Music plays a central role for both artists. While Maxa is deeply passionate about classical music, Miyamoto is interested in various kinds of global music ranging from traditional Japanese music to contemporary experimental Jazz. The logics and systems embedded in music, from exactly controlled notations to jam-session spontaneity, have been a source for their explorations and became a central inspiration for their works.

In Florin Maxa’s work, the Hexagon as a central mathematical shape, is the starting point of his exploration. Through his early computer renderings (as early as 1973) to his later distorted canvases, Maxa explores the inherent potential of this quintessential form on paper, on canvas and in objects. The hexagonal source becomes deconstructed and disfigured towards a free anamorphic shape, often in form of double-sided, free-hanging canvases.

Following his recent solo show at EXILE in Berlin, the presentation in New York shows a selection of works that have survived his drastic action in 1981 in which he burnt many of his early works as a sign of personal freedom and protest against communist censorship in Romania following his first, and until today, only solo exhibition in Bucharest in 1980.

Kazuko Miyamoto moved to New York in 1964 and has been deeply involved in the minimalist scene since her initial meeting with Sol Lewitt in 1968. Miyamoto operated mainly within the private realm of her studio, only showing her works to friends and peers, avoiding any artist limelight. As a founding member of A.I.R. women art collective in 1972, Miyamoto developed her practice quietly as an active member, showing in 5 solo exhibitions through A.I.R. up until 1980.

The works in the exhibition are from the 1970s and show her early diversion from stringent minimalist logic towards a more subtle, free, and personal expression. Error, as a positive sign of human individuality and a core aspect of improvisation, have always been central to her work. In one of the few surviving paintings from the period, on view for the first time since 1973, Miyamoto draws her inspiration from the natural pattern of a fern frond. The artist abstracts this pattern onto canvas allowing her hands to follow a minimalist imprecision that would become increasingly important to her work until today.

The exhibition of works of Kazuko Miyamoto’s and Florin Maxa’s want to encourage further investigation into the work of both artists and simultaneously raises questions about the understanding of minimal artistic practice as well as creative exchange across borders during cold-war politics.


→EXILE@ONETWENTYEIGHT
128 Rivington Street, NY 10002
Opening hours: Wed – Sun, 1 – 7 pm
Exhibition opening: Thu, Apr 2, 7 – 9 pm

 

ART GENÈVE

Posted on by Regina Regina

Our presentation for artgenève combines the works of Gwenn Thomas (*1944, lives and works in New York), Kazuko Miyamoto (*1942, lives and works in New York), Nschotschi Haslinger (*1982, lives and works in Berlin) and Paul Sochacki (*1983, lives and works in Berlin). Beginning with the two photographs by Gwenn Thomas, all featured artworks investigate the relevance and importance of inter-individual engagement and co-dependency.

Gwenn Thomas’ photographs were taken in April 1975 at The Kitchen in New York and show experimental dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton and Group performing Contact Improvisation. Beginning in 1972, Paxton developed this practice based on the idea of collectively-experienced physical interconnectivity. Termed Contact Improvisation, this choreographic process pulls elements from martial arts, social dance, sports, and child’s play together to a new form of movement and physical interaction. Upon entering a Contact Improvisation structure, bodies must come together, give weight equally to each other, and create a movement dialog that can last for an undetermined amount of time. Contact Improvisation can be done by any person not just professional dancers because the emergence of a movement vocabulary depends on a specific touch and the initiation of weight exchange with another person. 

A piece of string, as a connector between two points, has been prominent in the work of Kazuko Miyamoto since her earliest string construction pieces in 1972. These iconic strings constructions follow a minimalist logic of drawing, in which each string becomes a spatial line between two points. In her later works this formal approach becomes more freely-adapted and organic, with the artist stating the birth of her son in 1980 as a turning point towards this more fluid and organic practice. Industrial string now turns to rope made from natural materials, often intertwined with other natural materials such as twigs or stones. The shapes no longer follow the logic of a straight line but are free in their individual form, expression and relation to one another. Often these structures take the form of bridges, in which the intertwined, almost woven structure becomes the connector between two points. 

The allegorical paintings of Paul Sochacki poetically describe the status quo as experienced and reflected upon by the artist. Often his works appear as fables or even visual haikus describing in quickly-rendered but at time painfully precise paintings experienced states in our contemporary world: a cat delicately balances in a treetop, seemingly dictating the treetop’s branches; a mythical beast has a heart of fire, yet it’s tail drips water allowing for a small seedling to grow. Entitled Fire department this work could well be an allegory of the urgency for socio-political action, despite the minute results that can be achieved. Finally, today’s sunset finds itself trapped in a cave. Sochacki’s poignant reflections remind quite painfully precise of the situation any individual faces within the alienation of the capital-fuelled anthropocene. 

In Nschtoschi Haslinger’s ceramic installation entitled Unkentreff ten toads gather around a campfire. In various global cultures toads play a specific mythical, medicinal or spiritual role. In biblical times the occurrence of toads raining from the sky was seen as a prophetic prediction, while in medieval times toads were compared to the female womb and often offered as religious sacrifice against infertility. Then again, if rubbed correctly, the cane toad can produce an LSD-like toxin used for psychedelic stimulation. Haslinger references these escapist strategies as analogies for her own production. Beginning with drawings, her ceramics are metaphors for experienced emotional states. The majority of Haslinger’s toads appear laying on their backs, either overdosed or dead pointing to a dystopian time, or a ritual going fatally wrong. 

The ten artworks on the walls surround ten frogs surrounding a campfire. Hung deliberately low, the artworks assume a viewing height of a child, an animal or a participant of a ancient ritual. As in concentric circles around a flaming fire, toads and artworks orbit the ritual’s focal sun present in the camp fire. The booth becomes itself an unanswered prophecy, a processional ritual of interaction. From Contact Improvisation to Contact High – let’s gather together around a campfire and create waves of movement.

 

 

 

New Work, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, 1979

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to inaugurate its new location with a special, one night only, screening of previously unseen footage of Kazuko Miyamoto’s 1979 solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in New York. The two early video reels have only recently been digitized as part of the gallery’s ongoing research into, and archiving of, the work of artist Kazuko Miyamoto.

The exhibition entitled New Work was on view from March 13 – April 4, 1979 at A.I.R. Gallery at 97 Wooster Street in New York’s Soho neighborhood. Miyamoto, who joined the women’s art collective in 1974, showed her works on multiple occasions in solo and group exhibitions at the collectively-operating gallery. The exhibition consisted of four large-scale sculptural interventions named String Constructions by the artist. These works were titled, Black Poppy, Trail Dinosaur, Trail of Illusion, and Mariana, and were accompanied by five String Construction Drawings, which stood in direct relation to the works.

Turning away from painting, Miyamoto began creating her String Constructions in 1972. The earliest, still wall-mounted pieces, were created in her studio at 117 Hester Street (e.g. String along mortar line, 1972 in: Kazuko Miyamoto. Published by Exile, 2013, p. 49). Increasingly, these string constructions evolved to more complex forms (e.g. Untitled, John Weber Gallery, 1975. cat p. 54-55) or adopted elements of weaving (e.g. Egypt, PS1, 1978. cat p. 52). The artist also created few free-standing pieces (e.g. String around cylinder of my height, A.I.R., 1977. cat p. 63) though only one of these works still exists in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan.

From the mid 1970s, Miyamoto’s String Constructions started to extend from the wall into the space itself, resulting in three-dimensional shapes that responded directly to the architectural environment and often allowed for a spatial interaction by the viewer (e.g. Black Poppy, A.I.R., 1979 and Exile, 2009). With their growing complexity and dimension, Miyamoto’s practice became increasingly collaborative, often working with artist, peers, and friends to create these works.

The 1979 exhibition, New Work, marked a turning point for Miyamoto as she again evolved her practice towards new artistic strategies expressed through materials such as cardboard, natural elements (twigs and leaves), and packaging paper. By 1980, following the birth of her son, her work became “more organic and natural” resulting in complex, but still almost always temporal, installations, sculptures and outdoor projects.

All string constructions are based on drawings as their source and begin with nails hammered into a surface; either solely into a wall, or into wall and floor. Two such nails are then connected to each other by industrial cotton string or, less often, by hand-dyed wool. By interlocking with the architectural space none of these works are intended to extend past their exhibition’s life span. They are by definition temporal and stand in direct relation to the artist’s body. In fact, one could argue that body and space are made visible through string and nail.

The two video reels, now shown for the very first time, document the four string constructions on display at the 1979 exhibition, approaching the construction from different angles and fleeting perspectives. The filming was done after hours with a small group of the artist’s friends present within the gallery. Over the course of the filming, this small group of people started to interact spontaneously with the works or is at times specifically directed by Miyamoto. Using mainly a hand-held video camera, the two reels present itself somewhere between documentation and spontaneous participatory happening.

None of the artworks in the exhibition have been seen in public since this 1979 exhibition except the string construction Black Poppy which has been re-installed by Miyamoto at EXILE in 2009. The ink drawing Trail Dinosaur, also visible in the video, was recently shown as part of the exhibition Kazuko Miyamoto <> Florin Maxa: A dialogue at EXILE@ONETWENTYEIGHT in New York.

On two occasions during the exhibition in 1979, the dancer Yoshiko Chuma performed A girl on trail dinosaur, which was also recorded on video.  This reel was also digitized and can be viewed upon request.

Should you have any information on these events please contact the gallery.

On view:
Kazuko Miyamoto: Documentation of A.I.R. exhibition, ½-inch EIAJ open reel video tape transfer to DVD, (Part 1: 23:32 min), 1979
Kazuko Miyamoto: Documentation of A.I.R. exhibition, ½-inch EIAJ open reel video tape transfer to DVD, (Part 2: 31:45 min) 1979

Viewable upon request:
Yoshiko Chuma and Kazuko Miyamoto: A girl on Trail Dinosaur, ½-inch EIAJ open reel video tape transfer to DVD, 27:26 min, 1979

MANIFESTA, Palermo

Posted on by Regina Regina

We are happy to invite you to EXILE X Summer Camp: May the bridges I burn light the way selected by Manifesta as part of this year’s 5x5x5 collateral program for Manifesta in Palermo.

The initial part of May the bridges I burn light the way is a temporary exhibition that creates face-to-face conversations between social activism, art practices and Palermo’s socio-cultural realities. Departing point is the exploitation of the self for marketing purposes or as alibi for personal intentions, as sometimes in the #metoo debate or the current rise of populism.

May the bridges I burn light the way evolves through conversations, screenings and performative interventions at Cre.Zi Plus, a daily changing group exhibition at Ballaró Market, and the distribution of the street newspaper ‘Arts of the Working Class‘, a tool of integration between the citizens of Palermo and art professionals arriving to reflect on arts and society during the opening days of Manifesta 12.

Participants: Albrecht Pischel, Angels Miralda Tena, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Ayami Awazuhara & Christopher Burman, Bob Hausmann, Club Fortuna, Heiner Franzen, Dietrich Meyer, Elmar Mellert, Kazuko Miyamoto, Erik Niedling, Federico del Vecchio, Iris Touliatou, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Kinga Kielczynska, Lauryn Youden, Lorenzo Marsili, Narine Arakelyan, Nschotschi Haslinger, Martin Kohout, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Paul Sochacki, Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Sarah Lehnerer, Sara Løve Daðadóttir, Sebastian Acker, Utopian Union, Zoë Claire Miller.

May the bridges I burn light the way is curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo, in collaboration with Alina Kolar, Dalia Maini and Christian Siekmeier.

EXILE X Summer Camp was organized with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, Laboratory ABC Moscow, Goethe Institut Palermo, Podere Veneri Vecchio, Studio Botanic and Reflektor M.

 

FURTHER INFORMATION

MANIFESTA 5x5x5
→May the bridges I burn light the way

DETAILED DAILY PROGRAM (June 13-17)
→Daily program (PDF, A3, 2 pages, 3MB, English)
→Programma giornaliero (PDF, A3, 2 pagine, 3MB, Italiano)

LOCATIONS (June 13-17)
→Cre.Zi Plus is a community kitchen and co-working space in the areal of Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, where the conversations and screenings will take place.
→Ballarò is the oldest food market in Palermo held in Albergheria neighborhood, where EXILE will present a daily changing group exhibition during the opening dates of Manifesta 12.

DETAILED GOOGLE MAPS
→Cre.Zi Plus
→Ballarò

REVIEWS
→Marie Civikov in Jegens & Tevens (NL)
→Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir in art.zine.is (IS)
→Kathrin Schöner & Stephan Becker in Baunetz (PDF download, DE)

 

Artist’s Portfolio

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Kazuko Miyamoto: Artist’s Portfolio
24 pages unbound, offset color-print
Softcover, 40 x 29,8 cm
Published by LA FÁBRICA in 2012
Sold out. These last remaining 20 copies are available solely through the gallery signed by the artist

250 EUR plus shipping