NYAB Event - Miyoko Ito “Paintings”

Miyoko Ito “Paintings”

Adam Baumgold Gallery (60 E 66th St.)

This event has ended.

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Miyoko Ito (1918-1983). The exhibition will focus on Miyoko Ito paintings from the 1960s to 1970s. These paintings, with their subtle mix of abstraction and figuration, relate to the work of Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, and Milton Avery.

Miyoko Ito was born to Japanese parents in Berkeley, CA in 1918. She studied art at the University of California at Berkeley for a short time until she was imprisoned in a Japanese-American internment camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ito continued her education in the camp and afterwards went to Smith College. After college, she was given a scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in Chicago that Ito’s career as an artist flourished.

Ito combines motifs from architecture and the natural world in her paintings, “allusive, suggestive of bits and pieces of bodies and the furnishings of our everyday lives. These elements are never resolved enough to overpower the imaginative arenas of her abstract fields. But they are suggestive enough, and perhaps even jarring enough, to lend another level of frisson to her works.” Her gradiated fields of color and quirky geometric shapes became influential to many Chicago Imagist painters.