Aiko Miyawaki: no beginning, no end

“I don’t have a sense of having “made” these works. I seem to have a sense of having “found” them. Brass pipes are quite long you know. And if you peer into them, it is overwhelmingly beautiful. But, even the brass merchants don’t seem to know this.”

—Aiko Miyawaki

In 1953, Aiko Miyawaki (1929, Tokyo – 2014, Yokohama) began studying with Nobuya Abe at Bunka Gakuin. In 1957, having wanted to know more about art overseas, Miyawaki traveled to the U.S. to study painting at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica City College. In the summer of 1959, she visited Vienna to participate in the World Artists Conference. On the strength of what he saw in Miyawaki’s work, Takiguchi Shūzō, who was a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), recommended for her to spend time in Milan. There, Miyawaki befriended Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, and Piero Manzoni, among others. In January 1962, Miyawaki temporarily returned to Japan and held her second solo exhibition in Japan at Tokyo Gallery. Her paintings caught the attention of a French art dealer, André Schoeller, who was visiting Japan. As a result, Miyawaki went to and stayed in Paris for a year to produce works and hold exhibitions with Schoeller. During this time, Miyawaki became close with Man Ray. In 1963, she went to New York and stayed until 1966. She engaged with Leo Castelli, Jasper Johns, and many others figures of the New York art scene. In October of 1966, she exhibited her work at the Guggenheim Museum’s “International Sculpture Exhibition” and her work, consisting of brass square tubes, received the museum’s purchase award. The same year, she returned to Japan and while she continued to exhibit across the world, she would be based in her home country for the rest of her life.

The current exhibition aligns works made between 1963 and 1980, during a notably fertile time for Miyawaki, as she explored movement, time, and space. An early painting from 1963 has a thickly textured surface that balances between chance, gesture, and rhythm. Three brass sculptures from ca. 1965-66 each consist of a stack of rectangular brass rods, some of which are moveable while others are permanently placed. A scroll painting from 1976 unfurls a continuous web-like stream over almost 15 feet (4.5 meters). Miyawaki stated about the scroll works, “I make those works like I was copying sutras,” a reference to the almost unconscious sequencing of repetitive marks and the mediative state which the process induces. In addition to these unique works, the exhibition also contains detailed etchings from 1980 that have similar imagery to the scroll painting: webs with no central focus. While the media that she used in each of these works is different, a consistency of vision (a balance between transience and permanence) stays strong.

Krakow Witkin Gallery would like to thank Jasper Johns for the generous loan of two works for the exhibition.