Michiko Itatani: Cosmic Codes
Over the course of her decades-long career, Michiko Itatani has developed a unique pictorial language focusing on the human desire to understand and apprehend the unknown. Cosmic Codes assembles six paintings spanning twenty years of Itatani’s practice, highlighting works that visualize ornate spaces for gathering. Installed in chronological order, the first painting, Cosmic Sleepwalk (2007) and last, Matrix Identity (2024), depict the same setting. This long arc of exploration across subject matter is a cornerstone of Itatani’s oeuvre.
Creating unique environments with architectural inspiration, both real and imagined, Itatani’s fantastical spaces are recognizable and familiar, but belong to no particular place or time. In a process largely influenced by fiction writing, she crafts layered scenes as character investigations of human experience within the larger context of the universe/multiverse. Itatani conjures settings comprised of disparate elements that coexist within the same moment of time; dimensions overlap, night crosses into the day, the celestial and terrestrial worlds intersect, chandeliers hang amongst stars, both illuminating the cosmos. In each painting a luminous set of rings, or portals, hover, offering a possible access point from one realm to another.
Itatani is most comfortable working at a large scale, and the grand proportions of her paintings allow for an immersive experience. Oscillating between matte, feathery figuration and precise, glossy textures, Itatani engages the viewer with elaborate interiors brimming with objects that gesture towards key human achievements in the arts and sciences. Planes of raised intersecting lines on the perimeters of most works create a visual frame while also conjuring the illusion of depth through linear perspective; a technique used by Itatani across her practice. By foregrounding multiplicity – through a range of vantage points, combining places across time, and so on – Itatani engages in a kind of worldbuilding. She combines what is perceptible and what is imagined, composing spaces where we can ponder the depths of human experience.
In tandem with her exhibition, the gallery published a conversation between Michiko Itatani and Nolan Jimbo, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In it, Itatani and Jimbo discuss the ideas that inform her artistic practice as well as her experiences as an artist and arts educator for over 40 years. The dialogue is also available digitally on the gallery website.
