Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - 'The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion' Exhibition

The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion 

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki

Pace Gallery, Seoul

October 31, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Kim Whanki 

Untitled, 1967 

Oil on canvas, 177 x 127 cm 

© Whanki Foundation · Whanki Museum

Pace  presents The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion, a pair of exhibitions of works by American Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb and pioneering Korean painter Kim Whanki, at its Seoul gallery. On view across two floors of the gallery, these dual presentations—organized in collaboration with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the Whanki Foundation—offer viewers an opportunity to witness how two 20th century figures with different cultural and philosophical backgrounds visualized their unique perspectives and forged a universal language through abstraction.

Gottlieb’s paintings fuse intuitive shapes with bold color fields to visualize emotion and the unconscious, while Kim’s canvases employ repeated dots and refined chromatic structures to evoke an Eastern sense of meditation and cosmic order. Deeply moved by his first encounter with Gottlieb’s work in the U.S. Pavilion at the São Paulo Biennale in 1963, Kim Whanki subsequently relocated to New York, where he embarked on one of the most intense periods of his career. Immersed in the city’s dynamic art scene, he gradually eliminated figurative references from his work, refining his language into dots, lines, and planes. His restrained compositions and luminous fields of meticulously placed dots evoke skies, seas, and constellations, transforming time and space into poetic abstractions. His celebrated Dot Paintings series, completed during these years, played a key role in the introduction of Korean Modernism to the global stage. Pace’s exhibition of Kim’s work from the late 1960s to the early 1970s focuses on the development of his Dot Paintings from structural compositions using crosses and quadrants (Sibjagudo).

A central figure of the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb was at the vanguard of American Abstract Expressionism. His Pictographs of the 1940s used an all-over grid structure and invented symbols to give form to the unconscious, and in the 1950s he developed his signature Burst series: paintings that juxtapose a floating orb with explosive brushwork. These compositions dramatize the tensions between order and chaos, color, and form, inviting universal and intuitive responses rather than prescribing narrative meaning. Pace’s presentation in Seoul includes a selection of works produced by Adolph Gottlieb during the 1960s and 1970s, including the large-scale painting Expanding (1962), along with canvases from his Imaginary Landscapes series, which utilize the form of landscape painting to include unlimited perception.

Though their practices were rooted in distinct cultural contexts, Kim and Gottlieb are connected by a shared pursuit of universality—using color, symbol, and structure to explore humanity, the cosmos, and the realm of emotion. The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion is conceived as a dialogue, where the visual and emotional resonances between their works illuminate the boundless possibilities of abstraction and its enduring significance in art history.

Adolph Gottlieb (b. 1903, New York; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as a key figure of the New York School. Initially informed by Italian Renaissance painting, Impressionism, and the European avant-garde, Gottlieb became an advocate of abstraction from the 1930s onward, notably organizing the protest of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1950, for which he and a group of fellow artists became known as the Irascibles. Producing paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and tapestries, Adolph Gottlieb developed an aesthetic vocabulary from Jungian theory, underpinned by aspects of automatism, primitivism, and Surrealism. He continued to refine these stylistic means throughout his career, pursuing images that evoke an immediate and visceral impact on the viewer, through his series of Pictographs, Imaginary Landscapes, and Bursts.

Kim Whanki (b. 1913, Jeollanam-do, Korea; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as one of the pioneers of abstract modernism in South Korea during the twentieth century. The artist studied at Nihon University, Tokyo, from 1933 to 1936, a period during which he began exploring abstraction. From 1946 to 1950, he served as a professor in the Department of Western Painting at Seoul National University, and from 1952 to 1955 as professor and dean of the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University, Seoul. He was appointed as President of the Fine Arts Association in 1963.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice - Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero

Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

September 4, 2010 - January 9, 2011

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective, the first retrospective exhibition of this great American Abstract Expressionist painter to be shown in Italy. Like those previously dedicated to William Baziotes and Richard Pousette-Dart at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, this exhibition brings to Italy a better understanding of a generation of New York artists that in the 1950s came to form American Abstract Expressionism. The origins of this movement in the 1940s is closely linked to the career of Peggy Guggenheim herself, and to her New York museum-gallery Art of This Century.

The career of Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), charismatic artist and thinker, is closely tied to that of other exponents of American Abstract Expressionism: for example, from the early 1930s he had firm friendships with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Rothko shared with Gottlieb the quest for a new pictorial language based on personal artistic expression, and was a founding member with him of “The Ten” in 1935. In 1941 Gottlieb and Rothko together resolved to explore mythical and Jungian subject matter, thus initiating an important early phase of the nascent New York school of painters, and signalling for the first time an avant-garde that was independent of European prototypes. Again with Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb was the author of a now-historic letter to The New York Times of 13 June 1943, considered the first public statement of theories underlying what was later to be known as American Abstract Expressionism. In spring 1950 he organized a group of artists to protest the position of the Metropolitan Museum of Art towards contemporary American art, a group labeled „The Irascibles‟ by an article in The New York Herald Tribune, and presented to a much larger public through an iconic photograph by Nina Leen published in Life magazine. The photograph included Baziotes Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Newman, Pollock, Pousette-Dart, and Clyfford Still, as well as Adolph Gottlieb himself. In 1958-59, a touring exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, that included Adolph Gottlieb and several of these same artists, was titled The New American Painting. However, as Sanford Hirsch, Executive Director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, notes in the catalogue: “Gottlieb is labeled an Abstract Expressionist painter, and it is true that he was one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism and one of its major artists through the 1940s and 1950s. However, the term itself is too narrow to comprehend the breadth of Gottlieb's art and its impact on his colleagues, audiences, and the art that would follow.” This exhibition sets out to reveal the diversity of Gottlieb's production, and its ceaseless evolution, according to his own aphorism: “Different times require different images.”

The exhibition opens with paintings, drawings and etchings from the 1930s, including portraits of Rothko and another close friend Milton Avery, as well as allusions to an important sojourn in Arizona in 1937-38. Next comes a numerous selection, for the first time in Italy, of the first cohesive series of Adolph Gottlieb's paintings, the Pictographs, begun in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor and America's entry to World War II. These place Gottlieb, alongside Rothko and a few others such as Arshile Gorky and Pollock, among the pioneers of the new American avant-garde. Typically a grid segments the picture surface; inside its compartments Adolph Gottlieb placed symbols, whether a hand, an eye, or hieroglyphs of his own invention that blend American Indian or other primitive ritual imagery with allusions to Greek mythology. They influenced a specific formal component of Abstract Expressionism, the „allover‟ composition, which disperses pictorial incident evenly across the picture surface. Having exhausted the visual possibilities of the Pictograph, Adolph Gottlieb developed novel compositional types such as the Labyrinths (beginning with Labyrinth #1, 1950, in the exhibition) and Imaginary Landscapes from 1951, such as Sea and Tide (1952, in the exhibition). In the first group the grid of the Pictographs either takes over and dominates the painting, or becomes transparent, revealing concealed brushwork in the depths of the painting. In the second the composition splits into two zones, with celestial bodies in the upper part and an imaginary, vigorously brushed „landscape‟ below. These works coincide with Gottlieb's growing commercial and critical success in the mid 1950s. In 1956, the lower part of the Imaginary Landscapes detached itself from the picture edges to become an independent floating form in vertical compositions known as the Bursts, Gottlieb's best known works. A jury headed by Italian critic and historian Giulio Carlo Argan awarded Adolph Gottlieb first prize at the 1963 São Paulo Biennial. In the 1960s, notwithstanding the emergence of Pop Art, antithesis of Abstract Expressionism, Gottlieb's painting was perceived as a prophetic and vital source of Minimal art. The exhibition also includes a selection of Adolph Gottlieb's sculptures, made from colored cardboard and presented in the company of the cosmic images that inspired them. The exhibition closes with a series of late works in which the explosive Burst contracts into more geometric and cooler discs, painted in the years prior to his death aged almost 71 in 1974.

Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective

Exhibition catalogue

Giunti Editore, 2010

The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue by Giunti Editore, in English and Italian, includes essays by Luca Massimo Barbero, Associate Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and by Pepe Karmel, Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Fine Arts, New York University. 

The exhibition has been organized in partnership with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York, which has lent numerous paintings and sculptures from its holdings. The exhibition also benefits from loans from the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Musée national d'art moderne (Centre Pompidou), Paris, the American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, and from several private collectors.

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION

Palazzo Venier del Leoni

701 Dorsoduro, 30123 Venezia

www.guggenheim-venice.it