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SHIGEKO KUBOTA: SOPHIE TAEUBER-ARP:

LIQUID REALIT Y LIVING ABSTRACTION

The Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art presents Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Living Abstraction, the first major US exhibition in 40 years
Reality, on view from August 21, 2021, through January 1, 2022. to survey this multifaceted abstract artist’s innovative and
Likening video technology to a “new paintbrush,” New York– wide-ranging body of work. On view November 21, 2021,
based Shigeko Kubota (Japanese, 1937–2015), whose career to March 12, 2022, the exhibition will explore the artist’s
spanned more than five decades, was one of the first artists interdisciplinary approach to abstraction through some 300
to commit to the video medium in the early 1970s. Formally works assembled from over 50 public and private collections
trained as a sculptor, Kubota’s varied accomplishments as an in Europe and the US, including textiles, beadwork,
artist, collaborator, curator, and critic helped to shape a pivotal polychrome marionettes, architectural and interior designs,
period in the evolution of video as an art form. The first solo stained glass windows, works on paper, paintings, and relief
presentation of the artist’s work at a US museum in 25 years, sculptures.
this exhibition focuses on a body of work whose resonances
are particularly poignant amid today’s digitally interconnected Sophie Taeuber-Arp will be organized chronologically,
world. The six sculptural works in the exhibition include: Three beginning with works produced soon after the artist’s move
Mountains (1976-1979), Berlin Diary: Thanks to My Ancestors to Zurich in 1914, and ending with those created during
(1981), River (1979-1981), Niagara Falls I (1985), Video Haiku World War II, in the months immediately preceding her
(1981), and Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976). untimely death in 1943. Related works across disciplines will
The single-channel work, Self-Portrait (c. 1970–71), is Kubota’s be placed in proximity to one another to explore the artist’s
earliest known experimentation with video and electronic color distinctive cross-pollinating approach to composition, form,
synthesis. and color. Among the significant bodies of work included in
the exhibition will be Taeuber-Arp’s vividly colored, abstract
Shigeko Kubota. Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976). Standard- textile studies; her decorative art objects, such as beaded
definition video and Super 8mm film transferred to video (color, silent; 5:21 bags and necklaces, rugs, embroidered tablecloths and
min.), four cathode-ray tube monitors, and plywood. 66 1/4 × 30 15/16 × 67
in. (168.3 × 78.6 × 170.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of pillow cases, and turned-wood containers; the polychrome
Margot and John Ernst, Agnes Gund, and Barbara Pine, 1981. Photo: John marionettes she designed in 1918 for the puppet play King
Wronn. Digital image © 2021 The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Stag; and a remarkable group of small, stylized sculptural
Imaging and Visual Resources. Artwork © 2021 Estate of Shigeko Kubota /
Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY heads associated with Dada.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Dada Head. 1920. Oil and metallic paint on wood Height:
11 9/16″ (29.4 cm), diam.: 5 1/2″ (14 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY, photo Philippe Migeat

84 WORLD of ART