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Bumin Kim and Luisa Duarte: Threading through the Territories


April 03 - May 15,2021

From the gallery: “Line is a rich metaphor for the artist. It denotes not only boundary, edge or contour, but is an agent for location, energy, and growth. It is literally movement and change - life itself.” - Lance Esplund 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. 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 which 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.  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. About the Artists: Originally from South Korea, Bumin Kim received her MFA in Drawing and Painting in 2015 from the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas. In 2017 she was awarded at the 30 th  annual international competition and exhibition, Materials: Hard+Soft. Her work has been shown by various institutions, including: Pulse Art Fair in Miami, FL; Dallas Art Fair in Dallas, TX; Art Aspen in Aspen, CO; and Texas Contemporary Art Fair in Houston, TX. Furthermore, Kim’s work has been featured in publications, such as: New American Paintings, Fresh Paint Magazine, and Glasstire, and can be found in public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. In 2020, Bumin Kim completed an artist residency at Facebook’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.  Houston-based artist Luisa Duarte was born in Caracas, Venezuela. She received her B.D. in Architecture from La Universidad del Zulia in Maracaibo, Venezuela in 1987. Her work has been exhibited in various institutions around the world, including the 2017 Texas Biennial in Austin, TX; the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art in Dallas, TX; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia in Maracaibo, Venezuela; the Museo de Miranda in Los Teques, Venezuela; and Galveston Arts Center in Galveston, TX. She received first place in the 10th annual Visual Art Alliance Juried Invitational in 2016. Most recently, Duarte’s work was featured in a solo exhibition, Inseparable Ties, curated by Kinzelman Art Consulting, in the TC Energy Buliding, Houston, Texas."

On View: April 03, 2021 | 11-5 pm
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Anya Tish Gallery 4411 Montrose
Houston, TX 77006
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