LYDIA OKUMURA

Situation III

“It is not my goal to turn a space into something that it is not, but rather to  highlight its nature and thus strengthen its potential.” Lydia Okumura, 2017

Born in São Paulo in 1948 to a family of Japanese descent, Lydia Okumura studied artistic and industrial ceramics, followed by visual arts in the worst years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. “We were the children of immigrants trying to understand our world and at the same time create art. The Brazilian modernism developing in Rio de Janeiro was completely beyond our reach.” Okumura was a faithful reader of the Japanese art monthly Bijutsu Techo, which published texts on the international artistic movement and on Japanese contemporary artists, including members of the Gutai group. In one of its issues she discovered an article that made a great impression on her – it concerned the 10th Biennial in Tokyo (1970), where conceptual artists from the USA and Europe (including Edward Krasiński) were presented under the motto Between Man and Matter. As a result of discussion with other students, the first exhibition of conceptual art was held in São Paulo.

In those early years Okumura established the Equipe3 collective with Genilson Soares and Francisco Inarra. In 1972, after learning that works submitted for the 5th Young Contemporary Art Exhibition at the São Paulo University Museum of Contemporary Art by foreign artists such as Jannis Kounellis or Daniel Buren and Brazilian artists living abroad had been rejected, the Equipe3 members initiated the Incluiros Excluidos [We Include the Excluded] project by implementing the submitted works. Daniel Buren’s description of the project never arrived and Okumura wrote it on a fiche reserved for his work: “In the atmosphere of waiting for the work / the presence of the artist is summarized.” In 1972, the artist created three earthworks side-by-side with the artists Equipe3 in Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Campinas, which refer in an interesting way to Robert Smithsson’s concept, while making a clear reference to the South American visual sensitivity of geometric forms.

At the 1973 São Paulo Biennale, members of Equipe3 made Pontos de Vista [Points of View], an installation composed of three individual geometric proposals arranged so thatthy were in a harmonious dialogue with one another. This project was a breakthrough and a starting point for future geometrical site-specific installations by Lydia Okumura, with their spatial projection and the exploration of the optical game between two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures.

In 1974, Lydia Okumura moved to New York to study at the Pratt Graphic Center and began a series of Situations: geometric installations and objects created using ‘poor’ materials such as wall paint, string, glass and metal mesh.

Okumura took part in many exhibitions in private and public galleries in the US and other countries. She was invited to Tokyo and Osaka in 1979, 1980 and 1983, and participated in the VI International Graphic Arts Biennial in Krakow in 1976. At the São Paulo Biennale in 1977, she produced one of her flagship works, the In Front of Light installation.

In the late 1970s Okumura created large-scale installations, for example at the Cayman Gallery in SoHo in 1978, where she took part in the Medellin Biennale in Colombia in 1981, where she presented a large, three-part spatial composition made of string and color.

In 1984 she had her largest solo exhibition to date, Instalação, at the Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, to mark the inauguration of the new glass wall designed by the famous architect Lina Bo Bardi. She exhibited over 40 new works made of materials such as metal mesh, wire and wood, as well as one of her key works, the rainbow optical-architectural sculpture Labyrinth. The exhibition proved to be a great success and was well received by institutions and collectors, but the artist was most moved by the experience of looking at the exhibition through the eyes of children who collected money for keeping watch over cars in the parking lot in front of the museum: “Looking at the barefooted kids I allowed into the museum, I understood that I was creating art simply for people. […] Minimalism, geometry, environmentalism are all strategies. The artist chooses the appropriate form of expression and looks for the best way to express an idea. Conceptual art is a response to the apathy of the merely decorative, false, to the rejection of values that should have been taken into account. An idea, a truth, a knowledge, produces a sentence; energy requires a form of expression, and this creates a language. Today the world is interpreted in terms of quantum energy, but what has changed is the awareness of the truth, which Buddha said already 3000 years ago – that the physical world is an illusion, that it does not exist, that everything is temporary. The artist can help by observing not only the physical and mental level, but also the level of thought, as well as the human inner self. A work of art offers a pause for such (self-)reflection. Geometry is an intelligent way of expressing the concept of multidimensionality as an aspect of the truth of life.”

By Anke Kempkes

Lydia Okumura had her first American retrospective in 2016 at the UB Art Galleries in Buffalo. The exhibition is currently on display at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, Arizona (until 14 October 2018). She also participates in an exhibition prepared by Anke Kempkes entitled Land of Lads, Land of Lashes – Rosemarie Castoro, Lydia Okumura, Wanda Czełkowska at the Thaddeus Ropac Gallery in London (until August 11, 2018).

You can also see artist’s works: Situation I and Situation II at  Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw.

Signum Foundation Gallery, ul. Piotrkowska 85, Łódź