Swelling seeds and pods bloom into whimsical compositions, while cellular rhythms pulse through the sturdy stems and flourishing petals, sometimes threaded with human-like faces and punctuated with self-portraits, Ito has been painting a quietly radical aesthetic proposition. Her work has long been staging desire and its many instruments as a primal force. But what meanders beneath is a field of revolution and resistance, desire with political capacity.

Ito’s iconography is an insistence on biological extravagance, one that exceeds the boundaries that are normally designed to contain it. The abundant anatomies act as refusals, forms that do not align with reproductive futurity prescribed by the patriarchal order. Instead they proliferate sideways, unfixed, and defiantly. Her compositions propose desire as a hybrid, multi-directional vitality that mutates, sprouts and leaks. In these organisms, one understands the body as a site of insurgency. 

The post-war Japanese nation- and society-building project became tethered to social discipline, gendered responsibility and normative domesticity. Women were positioned as agents of the home, bearers of the future demanded by the state. Ito’s biomorphic world appears to inherit this history only to pry it open. The surreal botanica and bodies challenge those ordered narratives of restraint and obedience, bringing out an interiority of the erotic, psychic and cellular.  

Her forms echo the tendencies of Japanese surrealism and folkloric animism, yet not falling into their categories. Her creatures remember the unruly mythologies of co-existence of spirits, plants and humans, while at the same time they engage with the post-war avant-garde art’s desire to rupture the boundaries of the body. But Ito’s intervention is distinctly feminist. She reclaims the floral and the decorative, divests them of their reductive associations, and records them as sites of mutation and political charge. 

The presentation brings together sculptural work as well as several large and small paintings offering a vision of subjectivity that is eruptive and alive.