Miyoko Ito: Three Works

American Art Catalogues and Pre-Echo Press are pleased to announce Miyoko Ito: Three Works, a special exhibition presented from July 10th to August 31st at American Art Catalogues, located at 239 West 4th Street, New York. Generously on loan from a private collection, the paintings on view—Pool (c. 1969), Engelson (1974), and Doors to the Sea (1975)—have not been displayed publicly since their acquisition sometime in the 1970s. As such, this presentation is a rare opportunity to expand the view of Ito’s singular abstractions.

Ito once said, “I have no place to take myself except painting,” which may explain why all of her paintings appear like worlds unto themselves. The azure-into-turquoise water of Pool rests calmly on the slope of a pale yellow landscape. (This work was featured in Ito’s first institutional show at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center in 1971 and can be seen in the documentary photographs from the exhibition.)The space of Engelson is stranger, its pale, earthy palette subtly contrasting the otherworldliness of the painting’s unplaceable architectural elements, while the strong verticality of Doors to the Sea—believed, so far, to be the only canvas Ito painted in this format—underscores how the painting itself is, in fact, the titular gateway. These two are both held to their frames by half-driven nails that create a kind of halo that’s at once radiant and violent—a detail that recurs throughout Ito’s paintings, lending them an added aura of mystery.

Miyoko Ito: Three Works celebrates the second printing of Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts, the artist’s only monograph to date, which was published posthumously and to great acclaim in the autumn of 2023.

Additionally, a 25-color silkscreened poster made in an edition of 100 by Leslie Diuguid of Du-Good Press will be available for purchase.

Finally, Miyoko Ito: A Reader, a compilation of the texts from a series of talks on the artist hosted by Pre-Echo Press, will be published later this year and include contributions by Matt Connors, Lubaina Himid, Jennifer Krasinski, Amy Sillman, Jordan Stein, Lesley Vance, Nicole Wermers, Terry Winters, John Yau, and more.

Miyoko Ito (1918–1983) was a Japanese-American artist who lived and worked in Chicago, Illinois, for most of her career. Known for virtuosic abstractions that appear both otherworldly and earthbound, she was little known outside of Midwestern art circles until recently. In her lifetime, she showed with the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery, and her work was featured as part of the 1955 Carnegie International and the 1975 Whitney Biennial as well as in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. More recently, she has been the subject of shows at the Berkeley Art Museum (2017–2018), Artists Space in New York (2018), and at the Matthew Marks Gallery (2023).

Pre–Echo Press was founded in 2016 by visual artist Matt Connors as a platform for disseminating a diverse and idiosyncratic array of recorded and printed matter.