Michiko Itatani’s New York Solo Debut: Cosmic Encounters
Text by Kira Wilson
Curatorial Production by Onyedika Chuke & Kira Wilson
October 27th, 2023 - January 19th, 2024
Storage is pleased to announce Cosmic Encounters, a monumental collection of complex, medium and large-scale paintings by the inimitable, Chicago-based painter Michiko Itatani (b. 1948, Osaka, Japan). An established Chicago arts icon, Itatani's impact is preceded by her history of artistic, philosophical, and community-driven accomplishments. Itatani’s oeuvre is long-established by her transcendent tendency for painterly techniques and symbolism. In this exhibition at Storage, Itatani’s range of work offers a dream-bound iconography of figurative and symbolic objects from the greatest extents of human curiosity. The first solo exhibition at Storage within our inaugural, ongoing exhibition series titled Press Release, Cosmic Encounters is also Itatani’s first solo exhibition in New York City after 30+ years.
Cosmic Encounters celebrates Itatani's alchemical range of skills as a color theorist and narrative thinker, with works that invite focused, generative investigations through visual narratives of science, mathematics, and art. Her immense paintings depict complex architectural expanses and mythical spaces packed with pianos, grand staircases, geometric grids, and celestial symbols. Through the sheer scale of Itatani's works, viewers are invited to enter new structural fields which philosophize the cosmic possibilities of the future. Her paintings seamlessly reference eastern and western art historical influences within these architectural and cosmic realms. Formerly an aspiring fiction writer in her youth, Itatani’s philosophy as an artist is dedicated to the literary endeavor of creating, generating, and dispersing knowledge. Overall, Itatani's rich and color-expansive rendering brings a sense of antiquity and spatial innovation which folds meaningfully into the inquisitive, artist-driven ethos of programming at Storage.
Deriving from her conceptual approaches and long history as an impactful artist, Onyedika Chuke proudly ushers Michiko Itatani’s paintings into the curatorial and spatial arena that Storage embodies as an intergenerational, contemporary art gallery at 52 Walker St. Itatani's oeuvre serves as a growing archive in its own right, born to propel her fundamental ethos as a painter: “My painting is a love letter to humanity.” (Itatani, 2023).