Anya Tish Gallery: Threading Through the Territories
Opening Saturday, April 3, 11 am to 5 pm
Artists Luisa Duarte and Bumin Kim will be present
Anya Tish Gallery is thrilled to present Threading through the Territories, a two-person exhibition featuring textile paintings by Bumin Kim and a thread installation by Luisa Duarte. Through the commonality of material, both female artists use thread as a metaphorical armature to explore the nature of the line and the potential held therein, abandoning two-dimensional restrictions of painting, and challenging the viewer’s visual and tactile perception.
BUMIN KIM
Dallas-based, Korean artist, Bumin Kim, acknowledges the transformative power of materiality at play and has repurposed the context of thread and string to emphasize the energy, delicacy, and grace of painting and drawing. Both the weight of the line, as thin and singular, and the collection of lines en masse, as solid form, are tools that Kim uses to build complex forms that vibrate just above the surface. Kim’s intricate manipulation of materials highlights her ability to challenge the traditional model of what a painting should be. Brushstrokes become thread and string, and the flat surface is liberated to breathe into three-dimensional space. This echoes the charged expanse between the earth and skies in North Texas, where subtle hues and solid forms dissolve into immaterial prisms of flowing color.
LUISA DUARTE
Throughout her upbringing in Venezuela, Luisa Duarte was widely exposed to contemporary non-figurative art, during a time when the Latin American geometric abstraction, constructivism, and kinetic art movements were at their peak. This aesthetic, and its push to create new ‘utopian’ cultural spaces in opposition to mainstream politics and culture, influenced her practice as an architect and as a visual artist. Experiencing these two worlds gave the artist a sense of displacement, and an underlying yearning to ‘belong’. This tension has led her to create imaginary spaces, that appear to straddle multiple worlds, perspectives, and forms. Duarte experiments with a variety of mediums and materials, where line, color, and texture provide an important structural basis for her exploration of themes related to the meaning of home: borders, location, identity, and the existing fragility of cultural differences.