Diane Itter at the American Craft Museum - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The 1960 marked the beginning of a renewed interest in textiles and fiber crafts. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of work being done then was large scale and expressively sculptural, with the fiber, repeatedly coarse and undyed, carrying a great deal of of the art's esthetic and symbolic weight. Diane Itter, the bring under rule of a traveling retrospective organized by means of the American Craft Museum, went the other way. Her work was flat, untextur pictorial and small. She used commercially available linen thread and through the late '70s had settl upon a simple knotting technique, a direct, hands-on [i]modus operandi[/i] that required no tools and little studio space.

But Itter, who died in 1989 at the age of 43 was scarcely a minimalist. She used centurys of colors, and her art was acutely labor-intensive, with each square inch of a perhaps 8-inch-wide work made up of above 400 tiny knots. She built her pieces from the clod up, with the images embedded in the phenomenon not imposed on a surface. Itter referr to her work as "slow painting," and it is clear that painterly pertain tos were important to her. gazeed at closely, the knots are like pixels upon a computer screen or dots in a Seurat painting. She embraced complexity, particularly in her repeated use of a gradual dissolve from individual color or form into another.

Dense and busy, her pieces are filled with mixed patterns, multiple readings, overlaps and layerings. She was an avid collector of textiles, and historical relations abound: African, Peruvian, Native American, Japanese and Amish. Many of the overall shapes she erected - stylized kimonos, tunics and fans - are also rich in associations. Itter also had a certain grasp of geometric abstraction, and the shuffl and stacked grids of Black and White Fan or Triple Grid Overlap #2 would direct the eye at home in a Kandinsky or a Sol LeWitt.

The pieces are usually bordered by means of long fringes of colored thread, ofttimes bigger than the knotted area itself. The fringes call forth the act of making, throw back the chaotic origins of the piece, index the colors used kid function as pictorial ultimate parts in their own right. They are linear, yielding sensual and unstructured (or les structured) In addition they increase illusionistic and perspectival consequences The dark threads bordering the underhanging central ultimate part of Gingko Glide, for instance, give a feeling of of great depth almost architectural space, while the fringe upon the diamond-shaped grids of Modulations #1 prompts tall, solid objects drawn in axonometric projection.

Itter said she thrived upon overstimulation, that her mind was constantly working to sort without ideas. She produced over 350 works in her life. They are beautiful, intelligent and precious in the best faculty of perception of the word. She clearly had plenteous left to do. (The exhibition was upon view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Nov. '95-Jan. '96 and will shut at the Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Mar.-May.)

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