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Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
From natural and political disaster, she became one of America's great artists
Great Works, In Focus • #194 From natural and political disaster, she became one of America's great artists Miyoko Ito survived an earthquake, incarceration and illness. Her transporting paintings defied ideas about abstract art. Expand the image Click to zoom in Column by Sebastian Smee June 12, 2025 at 11:42 a.m. EDT 2 minutes ago 3 min New! Catch up quickly with key takeaways Close alert banner By the time she painted this mysterious work in 1975, Miyoko Ito — the Chicago-based painter born to Japanese parents in California in 1918 — had survived the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923; spent six months incarcerated with her husband in a detention facility for Japanese Americans during World War II; raised two children; beaten breast cancer (a double mastectomy); and pulled through a second nervous breakdown, the first having occurred during childhood. She was producing about one painting a month. These paintings, it's now widely acknowledged, amount to one of the most powerful bodies of work in modern American art. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement If you've never heard of Ito, don't worry. I hadn't either until 2023. That's when I walked into one of Matthew Marks's galleries in New York and almost immediately fell into a hyper-suggestible state bordering on hypnosis. The works in that show have mostly ended up in museums and private collections. This one, untitled, is on view at Glenstone. Although it is abstract, it quietly evokes things the mind already knows: a landscape, forms of botanical life, even a head with wispy remnants of hair. Formally, the painting combines patterned, curving shapes with rectilinear forms, its coloring suggesting the mellow, radiant glow of worn velvet. Ito used graduated shifts in value — both tonal and chromatic — to convey atmosphere and spatial recession. But the way she uses these mechanisms is mysterious. The shapes seem to shift and float. You feel that, if you were to turn away and turn back a minute later, they might have changed irrevocably, as happens to the sky above the horizon at dusk. When you get close to the canvas, you can see how fastidiously Ito brushed on her paint, which in some places is thick enough to produce cakey textures and in others so thin that the tooth of the canvas and the underdrawing remain visible. There are unexplained abrasions in some areas, such as the bottom left corner of this painting. And in many of her mature works you can find a single, thin, meandering line — sometimes attached to a small circle, evoking an escaped party balloon or a slender line of reflected moonlight in broken water. For years, abstract painting in America was swept up in an ideology of progress and purity. Abstract artists — if they wanted to be taken seriously — felt obliged to meet certain criteria: patterned, 'allover' composition (implying infinite extension in all directions); extreme reduction; concealed brushstrokes; and a ruthless evacuation of all figurative content. Now that the critical orthodoxies of those years have collapsed, the artists who resisted them — preferring to follow their own paths, often working in regional shadows — seem all the more interesting. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Ito's work, which draws a little from Paul Klee and has affinities with some of her peers in the Chicago imagist school, isn't just 'interesting'; it's beautiful, shimmering and enduringly enigmatic. You sense that she had, besides the world seen by everyone, another world of her own, accessible to no one but her. So unaccountably alive are her paintings — yet so restrained and distilled — that they suggest portals to states of consciousness that stubbornly elude description. You do turn away from them, inevitably, but always with the fear that you may be bidding farewell to what the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer described as 'a sister ship to our life which takes a totally different route.'
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Laura Owens: Opening Doors to Surprise, Mystery and Awe
World literature is filled with descriptions of courtyards opening into courtyards opening into even more elaborate and beautiful courtyards and gardens. Real versions have existed, too, in ancient Persia and Rome, or Chinese scholars' gardens. These all come to mind in the Los Angeles artist Laura Owens's wildly ambitious exhibition of paintings, wallpapered rooms and miniature cabinets of curiosities across two full galleries at Matthew Marks. This is Owens's first New York gallery show in eight years, following a midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum in 2017-2018, and shows at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France, and in Los Angeles. Originally known as a painter who crashed through the boundaries between fine art and decoration, folk art and kitsch, she's now exploring painting as an immersive environment, one that also draws from various histories to build a compelling, singular vision. Owens is hardly alone in treating painting as environment rather than as a stand-alone object. The German artist Kerstin Brätsch currently has an exhibition at Barbara Gladstone in Brussels with moody wallpaper based on the intersections of psychology and the body. There are also, of course, immersive 'experiences' devoted to the likes of van Gogh, Hieronymous Bosch and Gustav Klimt — or a virtual tour of ancient Rome just outside the archaeological site of Herculaneum. Owens distances herself from these examples with her dogged commitment to research and detail. Nearly everything you see here, handmade or silk-screened and painted, is sourced from her drawings (and occasionally those of her children), as well as other collected samples of wallpapers, a magic manual, maps, treatises, even a haunting birthday card from her father. Owens's show begins at the gallery's front desk at 522 West 22nd Street, which has been outfitted with sensors: Pick up the gallery release, and a drawer opens to reveal her delicately painted handmade books. A roll of tape wobbles along the desk's surface and a ceramic pen holder triggers other movements. The magic of 'Fantasia' and fairy tales has been transported to the gallery. Enter the next room and you're surrounded by large beige and neutral-colored canvases that harmonize with the wallpaper, also created by Owens. The paintings, all untitled, hark back to Willem de Kooning's chunky abstract expressionism, with thick impastos that create texture and dimension, or Picasso and Braque's curvaceous Cubist collages. They look collaged, but the shadows are painted rather than real, an Owens signature. Near the ceiling, ringing the walls, is a garland of trompe l'oeil electrical cords that look at first like vines — a funny reminder that we're in New York, not in a country villa. This seems like the end — but no. Two unmarked doors lead into a long room with bright green and floral painted and hand silk-screened wallpaper, a secret garden. Medieval tapestries and Monet's waterlilies come to mind, as well as Rococo fantasy rooms like Fragonard's 'The Progress of Love' at the borrows from wallpaper motifs here and also recreates a tree from a Pieter Bruegel painting. This room includes another dash of magic: Little flaps and miniature doors embedded in the wall and programmed with timers fling open every few minutes, revealing miniature paintings underneath. And if you hang around long enough, you discover yet another backroom, also unmarked: a cramped nook where a video runs near the ceiling. It features birds in Los Angeles — but their beaks are moving and they're not just chewing: They're avian anthropologists, discussing human history (a dialogue originated by Owens and one of her children). They describe the experience of the volcano erupting in Pompeii (an obvious parallel to the fires in Los Angeles) and how most ancient cultures were deeply misogynist. Funny and poignant, the disasters of the past feel eerily immediate. The gallery next door on 22nd Street offers a different, more tactile experience. Where most art these days is made for looking rather than touching, here are five large containers on tables, like jewelry boxes, outfitted with marvelous handles and pulls (facsimiles of crushed cigarettes and miniature envelopes and pencils) and lined with specially printed books and other curios that Owens has collected, including slides from her father's extensive collection. The boxes(think of the famous boxes of the Fluxus movement) are organized around grand topics like Nature, Math, Magic, Death, Fraud and Deception. Manuals for magic, mathematical equations, maps and other printed matter can be leafed through, unfolded and admired. (An inventory of some of the materials, which appeared in a 2019 exhibition in Los Angeles, is at the website A door at the end of this room leads to another room, of course. This door is itself a relic: taken from a house Owens was planning to move into in Altadena, Los Angeles; the house it was attached to burned down in the recent fire. The room is awash with swirling patterns and trompe l'oeil tricks, but unlike the ones next door its peach and pink hues recall an ancient cave, or frescoed tomb. It could be the end of the world, inside a gallery in Chelsea. Here you are coaxed into pondering the connections between remote civilizations and our own. An archive of knowledge is held in the boxes and embedded in the designs on the walls, which merge millenniums of human effort, research and technology. And yet, like the anthropomorphic birds conversing in the video , we might ask, What have we really learned? What do we do in the face of disaster, with all the wisdom and skill we have amassed? Painting is a vastly expandable category: part trickery, part sorcery, part craft and labor. The show reminds us of our best deceptions, like pictures that trick the eye and equations translated into wallpaper patterns. But can art and ingenuity get us out of our present political and eco-quandaries? This show, with its extraordinary creative output, offers no escape but signals hope rather than defeat. In Owens's universe, doors open into other worlds, and magic and beauty surround us. Through April 19, Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 and 526 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-243-0200;
