Mizuma & Kips

“Through Line”

 

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Mizuma & Kips is pleased to present “Through Line,” an exhibition of works spanning more than a century and a half, and crossing several continents. These works are linked together by a shared attention to the specificities of form, especially as manifested through line work, whether that is in the fluid linearity of a 19th century Japanese print, the fine hatching of a Picasso etching, or the carefully balanced brushwork of a JM Haessle painting.

 

Spanning a range of mediums, including painting, drawing and prints, the work in this exhibition is connected by the handling of line, which is emphasized as something shared across disparate formats and modes of expression. For example, the Bernar Venet drawing displays a wandering “undetermined” line that plays with the orderliness of minimal and conceptual art. While the Lawrence Weiner work on plastic addresses the linearity of the written sentence as the most familiar way that language is organized. The two Chuban triptychs by the Osaka printmaker Kunikazu take us outside of both the West, and of contemporary art, with provocative prints that anticipate the use of stripe patterns by Western modernists like Picasso and Matisse by nearly fifty years.

 

From the flurry of gestures in the Sandro Chia etching and Julian Schnabel lithograph, to the density of the mark making in the Peter Doig, the other exhibited artists provide even more examples of the potentially endless ways that line can be used to expressive ends.

                                                                                                                                                               mizumakips@gmail.com

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