Kazuko Miyamoto
String Constructions

String Constructions is the first institutional solo presentation in Germany devoted to the work of Kazuko Miyamoto (b. 1942, JP), a leading figure in the Post–Minimal and feminist movements in New York, where she has lived since 1964. In her sculptures, installations, performances, and works on paper, Miyamoto explores the body’s relationship to space, material, and the politics of labor and display.

The exhibition focuses on Miyamoto’s seminal string construction series from the 1970s and 1980s, and is the largest collective display of these sculptures to date. Comprised of two– and three–dimensional waves of string, nails, and drawn lines, the installations interlace the notion of the collective, the performative, and the ephemeral in their conceptual framework.

Spread across the first, second, and third floors of KW, as well as its courtyard, String Constructions traces the shifts in Miyamoto’s approach to space, the body, and performance. Guided by the temporal dimension in the artist’s work, a number of her influential sculptural arrangements are recreated and on view here for the first time since their debut. The exhibition brings together string constructions the artist created in dialogue with the key sites of her career on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, reuniting them in their original constellations to form pockets of time and space.

In 1968, Kazuko Miyamoto rented her first artist studio on 117 Hester Street in Chinatown on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. During a fire drill, she met fellow artists working in the building, including Adrian Piper and Sol LeWitt. This chance encounter proved life-changing and soon after, LeWitt invited Miyamoto to work in his studio. Forming a long-lasting bond, she played a vital role in realizing many of his cube sculptures and wall drawings, working as his assistant until his death in 2007. In turn, LeWitt and his wife Carol LeWitt helped foster Miyamoto’s practice by collecting and exhibiting her work throughout her career.

In 1964, Kazuko Miyamoto graduated from Gendai Bijutsu Kenkyūjo in Tokyo, where she had begun studying painting two years earlier. Relocating to New York, she continued her painting studies at the Arts Students League, which she supplemented with lessons in printmaking at Pratt Graphic Art Center. Miyamoto’s practice and work began on paper. In the process of shaping her string pieces, she continued her work with the medium of drawing in the early conceptual stages.

Miyamoto first tested out the lines on varying types of paper, often graph paper, later tracing them between nails on a wall as well as between these nails and other nails she pinned to the floor. While some drawings have the character of construction plans (and were indeed to be translated into two- and three-dimensional waves of string), others are artworks in their own right, not necessarily meant to be realized in sculptural form. Miyamoto would continue drawing as part of her string constructions, often before adding nails and, rubber or cotton, string.