Hard Line Women" — group exhibition at Nonaka-Hill

Twelve Japanese artists active between the 1960s and the present day — including Rei Kawakubo, Tomie Ohtake, Atsuko Tanaka, and Kazuko Miyamoto — give substance to "Hard Line Women," a group exhibition at Nonaka-Hill that investigates a unique version of geometric abstraction practiced by women in painting, performance, sculpture, installation, and photography. The exhibition places this formal vocabulary in direct dialogue with central moments of the global feminist movement, arguing that these artists chose, throughout their lives or for specific periods, to sculpt, paint, and photograph hard-edged forms — as opposed to ideals of grandeur associated with the masculine, and in favor of rationalism and geometry as a response to the tension of their time. The fact that several of them — Eiko Yamazawa, Aiko Miyawaki, Etsuko Nakatsuji, and Shizuko Yoshikawa — also worked as graphic designers suggests a lasting interest in formal order and in a material reality that exists beyond the artist and the work. Together, they have left (and, in some cases, continue to leave) bodies of work that challenge formal and gender expectations, illuminating important threads of 20th-century modernism and continuing the project of exposing the pioneering contributions of Japanese women artists.