![]() ![]() The dyed and carved leather paintings, on view in his career survey “All of Me” at Hauser & Wirth, range from stories of injustice and violence to fond domestic scenes. At 21 years old, he survived a near-lynching, a horrific event that haunted him and echoed throughout his life’s work. ![]() His childhood and years on a chain gang were spent picking cotton, which imprinted itself into his consciousness. Ito’s art has that speechless beauty that emerges only when, as Friedrich Schiller had it, “sensuality and reason, duty and inclination, are harmonized.” JASON FARAGOīorn in rural Georgia and raised by a great-aunt, Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) suffered some of the cruelest traumas of the Jim Crow South. The fuchsia of the sky 10 minutes before sunset …. Ito’s colors are erotic, but also modest they draw from Giorgio Morandi’s dampened tones, they prefigure the ugly-chic palette of Miuccia Prada but what on earth are their proper names? The green-gray of goose droppings. Also irregular is her palette, a twilit, sublimely weird range whose best description might be adult. Irregularly, Ito stopped short when hammering some canvases to the stretcher bars, letting the nails protrude like a marquee. ![]() What she then made were structured abstractions of gently curved solids, pinstriped bands and rectangles rounded off at the top like gravestones.Įach painting is built up, layer by contrasting layer, and most suggest receding spaces, even classical landscapes, wholly unlike the flat forms of postwar American abstraction. She recommenced her studies after her release, but health troubles and family obligations prevented her from painting full-time until the 1970s. Five years after that rediscovery, her paintings are back in New York, at Matthew Marks, where 16 beautiful exercises of restrained carnality call for a silent pilgrimage.īorn in Berkeley, Calif., Ito had to abandon her education in 1942, when she was interned with other Japanese Americans at the Tanforan Assembly Center. In 2018, the nonprofit Artists Space reacquainted New Yorkers with the Chicago painter Miyoko Ito (1918-1983), whose singular abstractions had mostly been held in Midwestern confidence. ![]()
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