New York, the birthplace of minimalism, has not always been kind to artists who strive to expand the genre’s reductive orthodoxies. Consider how long it took this city’s art world to recognize the rigorous abstractions of Carmen Herrera, Virginia Jaramillo and Mary Corse. Herrera was 102 and Corse was in her mid-70s when they had their first museum exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Jaramillo was in her early 80s when she had her first solo museum exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston. Instead of seeing them as derivatives, the art world began to recognize these artists as pioneers.
Born in 1955, a decade after Corsica, Kim Uchiyama belongs to a generation of female abstract artists who have not yet received the recognition they deserve. When I visited the exhibition Kim Uchiyama: Heat and Shadow at 499 Park Avenue, in the lobby gallery of the building, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2014, I asked myself: what does Uchiyama do in his own painting?
In 2015 Uchiyama began making regular trips to Sicily. The seven paintings in the exhibition were inspired by the different sensations she experienced there, from the natural light and the changing color of the ground to the excavated temple sites of Selinunte and Agrigento. For the artist, the question was how to capture this collision between nature and man, changing light and aging ruins the entirety of his experience in a specific medium, without becoming anecdotal or narrative.
Uchiyama’s visual vocabulary consists of painting strips stacked at different intervals on raw linen. In her choice of color, height, placement and spacing, she imbues the painted bands and the spaces between them with equal importance. The internal rhythms and the shifts between the painted and bare bands recall a well-known phrase by the great English essayist and critic Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music”.
I felt this condition in Uchiyama’s work, as the interplay between the painted and unpainted bands establishes a dynamic, tightly choreographed composition. Like watching the dancers come and go on stage, watching becomes an active and engaged act, which is rare in the work of famous minimalists. Uchiyama’s paintings open up a space for self-reflection by summoning the viewer’s personal associations.
“Selinus” (2018) and “Meridian” (oil on linen, 72″ x 72″, 2021), exhibited nearby, provide a good introduction to the particularities of Uchiyama’s work. Despite their similar palettes of ocher and cerulean hues and the use of four horizontal bands of paint on bare linen, the differences between the two are significant. In “Meridian”, broad ocher bands are placed below a narrow cerulean and turquoise band near the top edge of the square canvas. The unpainted linen intervals are the color of coriander. While the color placement suggests earth and sky, Uchiyama undermines this perception with the linen intervals. She further complicates our experience of the work with dark and light hues that create the illusion of a receding view. Finally, the square surface refuses a reductive reading of the painting as a landscape.
Sicily, which was ruled by many groups including the Greeks, Phoenicians and Normans, was an important contact site for different cultures. Uchiyama’s paintings evoke these associations without specifying them. In “Selinus”, named after an ancient port in southern Turkey, the artist reverses the color palette, placing a broad ocher band across the top of the painting and three cerulean bands below. The irregular spacing between the colored bands leads me to wonder about their proportional relationship. The more I looked at these paintings, the more there was to see.
The remaining five paintings are displayed nearby on a wall, as a series. Although I saw connections, again the differences became the most important to me. And while the writer/reader in me wanted to make associations between the painting “Odyssey” (2020) and the Homeric epic of Odysseus’ 20-year journey to Ithaca, Uchiyama resists the literal. This resistance is crucial to the viewer’s experience of his work. Inspired by the light and the landscape of the Mediterranean, in particular Sicily, Uchiyama wants to free the work from these links without denying their inspiration. That she found a way to work within a tightly circumscribed vocabulary and create something both fresh and singular is no small feat.
Kim Uchiyama: Heat and Shadow continues at 499 Park, The Lobby Gallery (499 Park Avenue, Central Midtown, Manhattan) through September 1. The exhibition was curated by Jay Grimm, Jay Grimm Art Advisory and Kaitlyn Ward.
