NEW YORK, NY.- Alison Bradley Projects is presenting Golden Veins: The Art of Kintsugi and Transformation, a group exhibition curated by Deborah Goodman Davis. The exhibition remains on view through January 11, 2025.
Featured artists include Louise Bourgeois, Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, Naoko Fukumaru, Yuko Gunji, Yoona Hur, Tosh Matsumoto, Miwa Neishi, Yoko Ono, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Sami Qaq, Toonoo Sharky, Rachel Sussman, Motohiro Takeda, Bouke de Vries, Edmund de Waal, and Enatnesh Yallow.
Golden Veins: The Art of Kintsugi and Transformation centers on the philosophy of kintsugi as a powerful metaphor for resilience and renewal. This time-honored Japanese practice mends broken pottery using a mixture of urushi lacquer and natural materials such as rice, flour, stone powder, and wood powder. After the repair is completed, metal powder is sprinkled on top to decorate the scars. The technique is derived from the traditional Japanese craft of maki-e, in which pictures and lines are drawn with urushi lacquer on a base, and then gold or silver powder is sprinkled on top to fix it in place. Reassembled with the art of kintsugi, fractures become united by exquisite golden veins.
For this exhibition, curator Deborah Goodman Davis has selected a diverse range of artists and mediums to represent her interpretation of kintsugi and its spirit. Through ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, mixed media, photography, and performance, the artists on view explore resilience, transformation, and the beauty found in imperfection.
Highlights of the exhibition include the debut of Theaster Gates’ kintsugi-mended ceramics, with a cracked vessel that the artist repaired himself, building upon the urban restoration and cultural reparation explored throughout his practice: “The mended garment and the broken vessel are indicators of our dignity, of time passed, of histories sutured together, to be held and sipped from… I made this marker for the outdoors to survive, it needed a protective seam where the coil ruptured. The work stands as both monument and surrogate. While repair in the South is very familiar to me, its relationship to sacredness and honor is very much connected to my experience in the rural, coastal traditional ceramics town of Tokoname, Japan.”
Additional ceramic works include Bouke de Vries’ Cantonese Enamel Memory Vessel, crafted from 19th-century Chinese porcelain and glass, and a suite of once-broken historical vessels repaired and transformed by master kintsugi artist and conservator Naoko Fukumaru. Louise Bourgeois’ portfolio of seven limited-edition drypoint prints, La Réparation, delves into themes of psychological repair, trauma, and memory, through deeply personal motifs. Photographic works by Tosh Matsumoto and Rachel Sussman focus on architectural fissures found on buildings and asphalt—which, in the case of Sussman’s Sidewalk Kintsukuroi series, are carefully filled with bronze pigment.
For Davis, the act of kintsugi underscores how repair can bring forth new strength and beauty: “At its heart, this exhibition celebrates the universal experience of brokenness and renewal. Like kintsugi pottery, there exists beauty and strength in our scars, whether personal or collective. The concept resonates deeply with the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam—repairing the world—and the natural formation of keloids, scars that become stronger than the original skin, symbolizing transformation through healing,” says the curator.
