As she herself says: “At first, I started drawing lines. Just lines.” Noriko Ambe’s work revolves first and foremost around the line. Her art is a tribute to the line, from which she develops her entire body of work. In doing so, she has found a memorable form of expression—one that is extremely demanding in its radicalism—through a concentrated, minimalist visual language.

The starting point—paradoxically, in the truest sense of the word—is the line. It is the trace of the moving point, that is, its product. It arises from movement, specifically through the destruction of the point’s highest self-contained stillness. Here, the leap from the static to the dynamic is made. This fundamental explanation by Wassily Kandinsky in his book Point and Line to Plane—whose title already addresses the goal of the organization of drawn surfaces and, later, space—could hardly describe more precisely the underlying constant in Noriko Ambe’s developed oeuvre.

In his theory of the line, the British anthropologist Tim Ingold posits that the study of humans and things is a study of the lines of which they are made. This concerns the occurrence and production of lines in human daily life, such as when walking or writing. Lines inscribe themselves into our surroundings, tracing our actions and paths. Whether they manifest as a trace, are permanent or fleeting, real or metaphorical—they are omnipresent. Every gesture, every path is a dynamic and temporary line and an invisible expression. And it is precisely these considerations that provide a key to understanding Noriko Ambe’s art. As the artist herself stated in a 2017 interview with Catherine Craft: “I drew the lines without any rulers or tools, so they’re not straight, they’re slightly curved, there are distortions.” And I realized, Oh! These natural distortions are carriers of human feeling. This is my originality.

This is also evident in Mami Kosemura’s guest appearance in the Ambe exhibition at AOA;87. In her work *Creating a Void*, the Japanese video artist focuses on the traces of Ambe’s linear actions, which flow into a certain field of atmospheric emptiness. The artist’s working hand above the white paper becomes a visual cipher for the creation of a rich layering of emptiness. In this, Kosemura is also very close to the drawn self of Noriko Ambe, for everything she draws or cuts is the direct, unadulterated expression of herself, an expression of her innermost feelings.

Of course, the line-emphasized Topographic Paper Landscapes for which Noriko Ambe is known are, in their motivic premise, spatial structures drawn from nature and evoke geological strata. The engagement with landscape and organic growth on the one hand, and with the human-shaped environment on the other, naturally implies a fundamental examination of the dialectic between natura naturans and natura naturata. This dual aspect of the natural, which always accompanies the questioning of natural forms, ultimately leads to the phenomenon of the artwork emerging in parallel with nature. Noriko Ambe’s visual approach also revolves around this artistic paradox, in which the relationship between nature and art is expressed in a fundamental way. Equally essential here are the associative possibilities of the viewer, who brings their own perspective into the dialogue between humanity and nature and thus accesses the aura of the artwork.

Engaging with the things of nature is, of course, nothing new. Their depiction and questioning have existed since humans began to draw and sculpt. The scenario, however, is becoming increasingly complex, as can be seen here. This method of interrogating nature has several precursors in 20th-century art: though the results are entirely different, they presuppose the same reflection. Naturally, the question also arises regarding the specifically sculptural foundations of Noriko Ambe’s art. For the sculpture of our time, too, possesses a biomorphic tradition—that is, one shaped by the forces of natural life. Like nature—a fundamental keyword of modern aesthetics—sculpture opens itself to analogies with forces of growth.

White paper objects of poetic aesthetics and apparent lightness are the hallmark of Noriko Ambe’s sculptural work. She uses white paper to ensure a neutral ground that minimizes materiality as much as possible. Added to these are large-format, space-filling works such as *Tracking through the curtain*, executed in extremely durable Yupo paper that withstands the multitude of perforated cuts. Here, Ambe plays with the impressionistic light reflections generated by the installation in the space; she creates an illuminated void, the realm known in Japanese as “ma.”

Noriko Ambe is deeply aware of her homeland’s cultural heritage. She does not strictly quote paper cuts or Japanese paper art, yet she is mindful of the tradition of certain forms: a déjà vu one does not recognize—essentially an ironic paradox that she seems to embrace willingly.

Heinz Höfchen

| born in 1954 in Esslingen am Neckar. Studied art history, philosophy, and journalism at the University of Mainz. 1982: Ph.D. on German Impressionist painting. 1984–2019: Director of the Graphic Arts Collection at the Pfalzgalerie Museum in Kaiserslautern. Numerous exhibitions and publications on 19th–21st-century art. Lives in Offenburg.