It happened to be…
I was born female.
I was born in Kobe Japan, 1936.
I grew up in Tokyo from 5 years old.
I chose…
to become an artist.
to live in New York City in 1962.
to become an American citizen in 2004.
Now I am an “American, born in Japan.”
I am a human being who lives on the earth with all the people on the earth.
— Tamiko Kawata
Alison Bradley Projects is pleased to announce TAMIKO KAWATA, a solo-presentation of groundbreaking sculpture, works on paper, and site-specific installation defining the artist’s trajectory over six decades. On view from December 13th, the exhibition runs until February 24th, with an artist reception on January 11, 2024.
New York-based artist Tamiko Kawata (b. Kobe, 1936) came of age in postwar Japan: a climate in which resistance to predominant gender roles and class hierarchies of the era became core to both her personal and professional mission. She received her BA in Sculpture at the University of Tsukuba / Tokyo University of Education, developing a practice conceptually informed by the avant-garde aesthetic philosophies and movements of the post-war period, including Dadaism, Bauhaus, and Gutai, particularly in their use of unconventional and socially symbolic media. After graduating in 1959, Kawata worked as an artist-designer with Kagami Crystal Glass Works in Tokyo and, as the company’s first woman designer, earned the second highest salary in the nation, and the highest national women’s salary at age 23. In 1961, the artist immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City in 1962, working as the arts and crafts curator of the Japan External Trade Organization.
Kawata’s artistic practice functions for her as a “visual diary,” operating through the material subtleties of her diasporic experience. When she first immigrated to the United States, for example, she found American clothes much too long for her slight frame and adjusted them with safety pins, uncommon in Japan at the time. With her signature wit and resourcefulness, Kawata developed a successful safety pin jewelry collection. Its 1973 debut in the New York Times led to instantaneous notoriety with a cultured clientele. In 1978, she exhibited her first safety pin sculpture, a practice she continues today.
Displacing the safety pin from its usual quotidian context and thereby imbuing it with new aesthetic meaning, the artist weaves intricate chain link into voluminous forms—inspired by bamboo shoots, nests, and mountains—that are both biomorphic and geometric. With the sensibilities of textile, the artist’s works align with the sculptures of Eduardo Chillida or the explosive works of Eva Hesse, while cleverly responding to the minimalist grids of Agnes Martin and Sol Lewit. Some works resonate a distinctively Japanese aesthetic—a traditional bamboo basket weave—yet in a wholly non-traditional material. Skillfully experimenting with the textural qualities of metal and thoughtfully-timed exposure to the elements, Kawata achieves a range of tones, from a pristine nickel, to a golden tarnish, to a rich rust.
The artist is well known for working in a range of mediums—particularly everyday materials—including intricate drawings to cardboard sculpture to pantyhose installation, which will be on view. The exhibition demonstrates Kawata’s rigorous material experimentation as well as her maverick spirit: an artist committed to both personal and aesthetic freedom. Kawata's work has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions. Key institutional holdings include Honolulu Contemporary Art Museum (Honolulu, Hawaii), Lafcadio Hearn/Yakumo Koizumi Art Museum (Matsue, Japan), Museum for Arts & Design/MAD Museum (New York, NY), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal, Canada), LongHouse Reserve Permanent Collection, (East Hampton, NY), and PREC Institute (Tokyo, Japan) among others.
For further information and appointments please contact claire@alisonbradleyprojects.com