“For me, to be an artist each day is an intellectual choice and a carefully chosen commitment. There is no intoxication.” – Michiko Itatani

Michiko Itatani: Celestial Stage includes some of Itatani’s earliest and most recent artwork—affording a rare opportunity to explore the evolution of the artist’s approach across a prolific, 45-year career. Itatani’s earlier works appear minimal, absent from symbols and references which appear in her later work. However, certain marks do persist across time, producing a conversation among works—evidence of the artist’s sustained investigation into certain themes and motifs, as well as a freedom to reimagine the function and appearance of enduring elements. Itatani’s trajectory is not always linear. Her work expands and contracts, returning to early influences and stretching itself to extremes of abstraction and figuration.

“Untitled” painting/installation 78-J-3, the oldest work in the exhibition, is a three-sided black rectangular prism covered in raised, parallel lines that reach across the canvas, creating triangular mesh fields. The gold lines overlap three- or four-times over, creating a tactile, fabric-like texture blanketing a smooth, black background. Similar sets of lines appear in each of the sixty-four paintings on view, usually as curtains angling in from a painting’s left and right sides or as a surface on a multi-planed solid. Whereas the lines are the primary subject in “Untitled” painting/installation 78-J-3, Itatani’s later works often include the lines as a supplement to complex and figurative compositions of celestial libraries and devices. In these paintings, mesh curtains activate the surface of the painting and deny the possibility of an unobstructed view. The mesh seems to suggest that the image is not entirely knowable, or stable, and that it is always in a state of partial undoing by the most elemental character of image-making: the line.

The continuity of lines as an element across Itatani’s 45-year-career is just one example of the artist’s consistent visual language, which she often analogizes to writing. Her work across decades clearly shows the continuity and re-use of symbols, compositions, and systems of mark-making that evoke the precision and order of the written word. Two similar compositions are paired on the fourth floor of the exhibition: the diptych “Untitled” 81-B-4 (1981) and two paintings from Itatani’s Moon-light/ Mooring series, “Personal Codes” painting from Moon-light/Mooring 09-B-1 (MM1) (2009) and “Personal Codes” painting from Moon-light/Mooring 09-B-2 (MM2) (2009). The former consists of two large panels with white textured lines forming vaguely gabled geometric shapes stacked in a loose alternating pattern, resembling a foreshortened cityscape or rhythmic forest. The latter works, one rendered mostly in black and the other in white, likewise employ fields of textured line stretched to occupy large sail-like swaths of canvas. The lower portions of the paintings introduce rings of bright orbs, another symbol present in most of Itatani’s works on view, superimposed on glowing platforms of jumbled kanji characters. Here, the later works depart from analogies to land- or cityscape, forming a clear foreground and background—a clearing, perhaps—that theatrically presents a direct reference to the artist’s “language” of painting.

Itatani’s commitment to repetition creates an interior dialogue among works from different periods in time, always speaking to each other in a continual push and pull. This lends Michiko Itatani: Celestial Stage an environmental quality, submerging visitors in Itatani’s world. The titles of the painting mimic the naming conventions of newly discovered stars and planets, further suggesting that Itatani’s career has been less a linear journey than a slow populating of a constellation—one in which the fluctuation of mere decades does not interrupt one timeless conversation.