Kim Tschang-yeul 김창열 @ MMCA Seoul - National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea - Retrospective Exhibition

Kim Tschang-yeul 김창열

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul

22 August – 21 December 2025

Kim Tschang-yeul

Exhibition Poster 

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops SH87030, 1987 

Oil paint and newspaper on hemp, collage, 195×300 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) presents the first large-scale posthumous retrospective of Kim Tschang-yeul (1929–2021), a seminal figure in Korean contemporary art.

The MMCA has consistently organized exhibitions grounded in research on senior artists and art history to consolidate the foundations of Korean contemporary art and elevate its stature. As part of these efforts, this exhibition provides a comprehensive reappraisal of Kim Tschang-yeul’s oeuvre within the broader contexts of Korea’s modern and contemporary history and art history.

Kim Tschang-yeul was a leading figure of Korea’s art informel movement in the 1950s, pioneering a synthesis of Western contemporary art idiom and Korean sensibilities. Following his time in New York starting in 1965, he settled in Paris in 1969, persistently experimenting to forge an independent artistic language in response to the times. The motif of the water drop, which emerged in the early 1970s and remained central to Kim’s practice for the rest of his life, became a symbol synonymous with the artist himself.

This retrospective closely examines Kim’s artistic journey, with particular focus placed on the fundamental aesthetics embedded in his work and the evolution of his water drop paintings. The exhibition also seeks to deepen the relatively scarce research on the artist, offering an opportunity to reassess the identity and contemporary significance of Korean art.

The exhibition unfolds across Galleries 6 and 7 in four sections: “Scar,” “Phenomenon,” “Waterdrops,” and “Recurrence.” Gallery 8, serving as a type of appendix to the exhibition, presents unpublished archival materials and works that allow visitors to encounter the artist’s life and creative process from multiple perspectives.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Scar

The first section, “Scar,” centers on Kim’s early works and traces the historical circumstances and artistic activities that shaped his practice. Born in Maengsan, Pyeongannam-do, Kim Tschang-yeul relocated south alone at the age of 16, leaving his hometown behind. Having lived through Korean liberation, division, and war, he inevitably internalized the realities of life and death—an experience that became a crucial foundation for his art. Driven by a desire for new forms of art, he co-founded the Hyundae Fine Artists Association in the late 1950s, which became a pivotal starting point for visualizing the wounds of the era and led the informel movement. Kim Tschang-yeul also pioneered the internationalization of Korean contemporary art by participating in global platforms such as the Paris Biennale (1961) and São Paulo Biennial (1965), which marked key turning points in his artistic career. Along with works exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial, this section features Kim’s pre-informel works such as Sunflower (1955)—shown publicly for the first time—and his cover illustrations for the Police Academy’s bimonthly magazine Gyeongchal sinjo from his time as a police officer, providing insight into both the artist’s formative period and the social realities he confronted.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Rite, 1965

Oil paint on canvas, 162×130cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Rite, 1966 

Oil paint on canvas, 162×137 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Untitled, 1969 

Oil paint on canvas, 20.5×20.7 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA 

Kim Tschang-yeul

Composition, 1970

Acrylic paint and cellulose lacquer on canvas, 150×150cm

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Procession, 1971 

Acrylic paint and cellulose lacquer on linen, 150×150cm

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Phenomenon

The second section, “Phenomenon,” focuses on Kim’s works from the transitional years spent in New York and Paris, surveying the underexamined origins of his abstract paintings and the formal signs that prefigured the water drop motif. Encouraged by artist Kim Whanki (1913–1974), Kim Tschang-yeul moved to New York in 1965 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. However, his informel paintings failed to garner attention there, and the emotional dissonance he experienced in a capitalist consumer society left him with a profound sense of alienation and doubt. During this period, he sought a departure from the thick impasto of art informel, experimenting with refined surfaces, geometric forms, and illusory spatial effects. After relocating to Paris in 1969, Kim Tschang-yeul produced the Phenomenon series, in which the previously rigid geometric forms seem to dissolve into organic shapes, while condensed masses are rendered with a mucilaginous quality reminiscent of human organs. These experiments serve as an important precursor to the water drop paintings. On view for the first time in Korea are 8 previously unexhibited paintings from Kim’s New York period, and 11 drawing works from that time, and a 2 water drop painting from 1971 that predates Event of Night (1972), long considered his first water drop work.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops ABS N°2, 1973

Oil paint on canvas, 195×130 cm 

Wellside Gallery collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops, 1979

Oil paint on canvas, 80.5×100cm 

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops, 1986

Acrylic paint and oil paint on canvas, 73×50 cm 

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Waterdrops

The third section, “Waterdrops,” illuminates the defining characteristics and development of Kim’s iconic water drop paintings. The mucilaginous, amorphous masses on his canvas finally transform into complete forms—clear water droplets. These droplets aren’t a product of chance but the culmination of sustained formal experimentation and ontological reflection. Even in the austere environment of a converted stable on the outskirts of Paris, Kim remained devoted to his water drop paintings, eventually garnering recognition with his 1973 solo exhibition in Paris. Initially, Kim Tschang-yeul employed an air-spray technique to render hyperrealistic water drops, later expanding the formal possibilities of his work by reconfiguring the physical relationship between paint and canvas, incorporating stains, and adopting collage techniques. More than mere depictions of material form, Kim’s water drops resonate with East Asian philosophical traditions, functioning as vehicles for meditation while simultaneously evoking a surreal sensibility that entrenched the motif as his distinctive artistic language. This section presents key works from the Water Drop series, ranging from early (1973) to late.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Recurrence SNM93001, 1991

Ink and oil paint on hemp, 300×195 (×4) cm

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Recurrence

The final section, “Recurrence,” probes the source of Kim’s artistic creation and thought through the interplay of language and image in Kim’s Thousand Character Classic paintings. In the mid-1980s, Kim began incorporating text into his compositions, opening a new realm of expression. While painting water drops on newspaper, he became acutely aware of the intimate relationship between text and image, which subsequently led to his Recurrence series using the Thousand Character Classic. For Kim Tschang-yeul, the Thousand Character Classic was not merely a text but a symbolic system through which he grasped the order of nature and the cosmos. The text is also deeply tied to his childhood. Kim Tschang-yeul filled his canvases with the text as if practicing calligraphy on parchment paper, an act that signified both a return to youth and a reaffirmation of East Asian sensibilities, ultimately opening a space for profound philosophical musings. In his later years, the water drop became Kim’s existential companion, bridging life and art, while the Recurrence series evolved into an act of requiem, suturing life’s scars through brushwork. The Recurrence series, in which text and water drops converge, constitutes both a formal achievement reflecting the essence of his art and evidence of his profound reflection on the roots of existence. This gallery features Recurrence SNM93001 (1991), a monumental 7.8-meter-wide painting from the MMCA collection being shown for the first time, along with an abridged version of the film The Man Who Paints Water Drops, in which Kim Tschang-yeul recounts his life and artistic journey.

After leaving the converted stable in the Paris suburb of Palaiseau for an apartment, Kim Tschang-yeul replaced the nameplate on his door with a single water drop. There, he was affectionately known as “Monsieur Gouttes d’eau” (Mr. Water Drop), and his studio became a kind of sarangbang—a convivial space where artists and friends gathered. The archival section prepared in Gallery 8, “Monsieur Gouttes d’eau, Kim Tschang-yeul,” serves as an appendix to the retrospective, revealing alternate facets of Kim’s life and art. Among the works presented is Il pleut (1973), inspired by surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligram of the same title, which long served as a wellspring of inspiration for Kim Tschang-yeul. The work, which translates the structure of the poem into water droplets, holds greater symbolic resonance in that it is exhibited here for the first time in Korea and abroad. Presenting rarely seen works alongside precious archival materials and large-scale photographs of Kim’s studio, this section offers visitors an intimate encounter with the life Kim Tschang-yeul lived in the company of water drops.

The exhibition catalog includes interviews with the artist, academic research on Kim’s New York works that have lacked sufficient study or exhibition, and an essay by his family, offering a thorough overview of his life. The exhibition layout, which reinterprets the oeuvre of this artist whose practice was long based in France from a fresh perspective, was designed in collaboration with Studio Adrien Gardère, known for its work with leading museums including the Louvre-Lens and the Grand Palais in Paris.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition seeks to supplement the gaps in existing studies on Kim Tschang-yeul and provide a comprehensive view of the artist’s oeuvre, particularly works from underexplored periods. I hope that this retrospective will serve as an opportunity to rediscover and reassess Kim as an artist, while offering a rare occasion to encounter the distinctive aesthetics and sentiments inherent in his life and art.”

MMCA

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, KOREA

30 Samcheong-ro (Sogyeok-dong), Jongno-gu, Seoul 03062

www.mmca.go.kr

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Kim Tschang-Yeul: The Stillness of Water 

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Korean Landscapes of Homeland and Longing - A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Korea's Liberation @ MMCA Deoksugung, Seoul

A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Korea's Liberation 

Landscapes of Homeland and Longing 

MMCA Deoksugung, Seoul

14 August – 9 November 2025

Chun Hyucklim 

Landscape of Tongyeong, 1992

Oil paint on canvas, 130×160cm

Tongyeong City Hall

Nam Kwan 

Refugees, 1957 

Oil paint on canvas, 160.5×130.5cm 

Private collection

Kim Junghyun 

Landscape, 1940s

Ink and color on paper, 168×94cm (×2) 

Bookook Cultural Foundation

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), presents A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Liberation: Landscapes of Homeland and Longing at MMCA Deoksugung.

Through modern and contemporary Korean landscape paintings, poetry, and Manchurian exile Gasa poetry, this exhibition explores the sentiment of “hometown” that has remained deeply rooted in Korean consciousness throughout the turbulent tides of Japanese colonial rule and liberation, division and war, and the subsequent waves of industrialization and urbanization.

In reflecting on the 80-year history since liberation, the concept of 'hometown' serves as a key link between this land and its people. In Korean literature and art, the “hometown” is depicted as homeland, motherland, paradise, or an object of eternal yearning. During the Japanese colonial period it symbolized a nation lost, it became the land of nostalgia after national division, and it transformed into a fading landscape during the era of industrialization. Nostalgia for home has been an enduring emotional thread running through the country’s turbulent modern history, serving as a source of inspiration in both modern and contemporary art and literature.

The exhibition is centered around four themes: homeland, affection for home, displacement from home, and longing for home. It presents an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of Korean land through modern and contemporary landscape paintings that portray the loss and rediscovery of territory during the Japanese colonial period, the separation and dispersal caused by division and war, survival amid ruins, and the hope of reconstruction. In particular, this exhibition sheds light on the diverse layers of modern and contemporary art by uncovering and showcasing works that have long been kept in museum storage, private collections, or the homes of artists' families—such as regional landscapes and pieces by local artists that have rarely been seen in the mainstream art world.

Lee Insung 

Untitled, 1930s-1940s 

Ink and color on paper, 47×36cm 

Private collection

Part 1, “Homeland: The Stolen Fields,” examines perspectives of Korean land in the imperialist era through landscape paintings that depict the country’s various regions during the Japanese colonial period. During this period, the concept of homeland was shaped by Japan’s colonial perspective, which portrayed Joseon as an idyllic and pure countryside using the style of “local color” paintings. These works were simultaneously in vogue and at the center of controversy. Other artists, however, such as Oh Chiho and Kim Jukyung of the Nokhyanghoe (Green Hometown Association) in Gyeongseong, endeavored to express the true nature of Joseon through rich variations of light and color by recognizing “hometown” as a space that inspires national sentiment and seeking to discover the unique colors inherent in the Korean land. In addition, landscape paintings by artists from regional groups such as Hyangtohoe in Daegu, Chungwanghoe in Busan, Yeonjinhoe in Gwangju, and the art communities of Jeju and Honam region reflect the distinct climates and sceneries of their respective areas. This section presents works that reflect the complex perspectives surrounding Korean land during the Japanese colonial period, alongside powerful verses by resistance poet Yi Sang-hwa; nostalgic poems by other Korean poets including Jeong Ji-yong, Baek Seok, Lee Yong-ak, and Oh Jang-hwan; and Manchurian exile Gasa poetry written by independence activists in Manchuria, which have been inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. By presenting these materials alongside artworks, the exhibition seeks to explore shared expressions of the sense of 'hometown' embedded in the cultural and artistic consciousness of the time.

Heo Geon 

Cultural Landscape, 1945 

Ink and color on paper, 56×48cm

Private collection

Lee Sangbeom 

Returning at Dawn, 1945 

Ink on paper, 129×256cm 

Private collection

Yoo Youngkuk 

Mountain, 1984 

Oil paint on canvas, 97.5×130cm

MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection

Part 2, “Affection for Home: A Land Reclaimed,” explores how hometown emerged as a significant motif in the works of artists following Korea’s liberation. These pieces reflect experimentation aimed at conveying the vivid spirit of the country’s climate, terrain, and natural environment, along with efforts to incorporate traditional materials, colors, and aesthetic sensibilities. Featured artists include Son Ilbong, who returned to his hometown of Gyeongju after teaching in Japan and created numerous landscape paintings; Moon Shin, who returned to Korea immediately after liberation from studying in Japan and captured the vibrant energy of the sea off the coast of his native Masan; Lee Ungno, an artist known for his innovative approach to modern ink painting who explored diverse formal expressions in ink to capture the landscapes of his hometown Hongseong and its surrounding regions during the pre- and post-liberation periods; Kim Whanki, who forged a uniquely Korean modernism, inspired by the blue islands, skies, and moonlit seas of his native Anjwado Island in Sinan; and Yoo Youngkuk , who developed a uniquely Korean mode of abstraction through his persistent exploration of the mountainous forms of his hometown Uljin. Chun Hyucklim, who discovered a unique artistic language in the landscapes of his hometown Tongyeong, and Byun Shiji, who found his artistic identity in his native Jeju. These artist’ works highlight how hometown served as a powerful artistic inspiration. In this section, in particular, highlights how the artistic roots of well-known painters such as Kim Whanki, Yoo Youngkuk, and Lee Ungno can be traced back to their hometowns, offering insight into a crucial turning point in the transition from modern to contemporary art in Korea.

Kim Won 

Title unknown, 1954

Oil paint on canvas, 102×177.7cm 

MMCA

Byeon Gwansik 

Spring in Muchang, 1955

Ink and color on paper, 181×357cm 

MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection

Shin Youngheon 

Suffering, year unknown

Oil paint on canvas, 35×25cm 

Private collection

Part 3, “Displaced from Home: A Land Ruined,” examines depictions of Korean land as perceived and recorded by artists amidst the nation-wide tragedy of the Korean War. The City After the War (1950) by Lee Chongmoo and Demonlished (1953) by To Sangbong portray devastated urban landscapes with a sense of desolation and quiet melancholy. Abstract and semi-abstract landscapes such as Shin Youngheon’s Tragedy (1958), Lee Soo-auck’s 6.25 War (1954), and Nam Kwan’s Refugees (1957) express the horrors of war and the memory of suffering through dark colors, rough brushstrokes, and a fragmentation and deconstruction of form. Meanwhile, Lee Manik’s Cheonggyecheon (1964) and Chun Huahuan’s The Left Behind By War, (1964), painted from a realist perspective, vividly and intensely depict the bleak reality of the era, portraying the poverty and despair of refugee settlements during the war. Artists of this period reflected on their wartime experiences to confront trauma and terror while seeking to transform and overcome them through artistic creation. Rather than depicting tragedy directly, the expression reveals the inner emotions of people reflected in the landscapes, allowing viewers to interpret these historical landscape paintings from multiple perspectives.

Yoon Jungsik

Spring, 1975

Oil paint on canvas, 41×53cm

MMCA

Choi Youngrim

Spring Garden, 1982 

Oil paint and soil on canvas, 127×191cm

Seoul Museum

Kim Jonghwi

Hometown Nostalgia, 1987

Oil paint on canvas, 97×194.5cm 

MMCA

Part 4, “Longing for Home: A Land of Nostalgia,” features works by artists who explored their own artistic worlds grounded in longing and the pain of displacement and separation due to war and the ensuing national division. These artists included motifs in their work that evoke the lyrical sentiment of their native regions and depicted their hometowns as ideal paradises to soothe their yearning. Works such as Yoon Jungsik’s Spring (1975), Park Sungwhan’s Nostalgia (1971), and Choi Youngrim’s Spring Garden (1982), which present utopian visions of hometowns in the face of losing both family and hometown while enduring loneliness, isolation, poverty, and sorrow, pose a fundamental question: what does art leave behind and what purpose did it serve in an era of such loss and deprivation? During this period, artists who shared the experience of displacement came together to organize the 1952 Wolnam Artists’ Exhibition, followed by the founding of the Creative Art Association in 1957 and the Exhibition of Gusangjeon in 1967, through which they sought to explore a shared artistic direction grounded in the sentiment of longing.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition commemorates the 80th anniversary of Korea’s liberation by retracing the emotional resonance of hometown that has remained in our hearts throughout the country’s modernization, industrialization, and urbanization, as expressed through landscape painting. I hope it offers visitors a sincere experience of the perspectives held by these artists who captured the spirit of their times and their homeland.”

MMCA Deoksugung - National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

99 Sejong-daero (Jeong-dong), Jung-gu, Seoul 04519

www.mmca.go.kr

Teresita Fernández @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - "Liquid Horizon" Exhibition

Teresita Fernández: Liquid Horizon

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

August 27 – October 25, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Liquid Horizon, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist Teresita Fernández, on view at Lehmann Maupin Seou. Featuring a glazed ceramic wall installation and luminous sculptural panels that evoke watery realms, the exhibition extends Fernández’s ongoing interest in subterranean landscapes—soil horizons formed by geological and human-formed layers. Here, her inquiry moves into the stratified depths of the ocean, revealing layers of shifting density and transparency that expand the visual and conceptual language beyond the terrestrial.

Liquid Horizon marks Fernández’s debut at the gallery’s Seoul location and her first exhibition in the city in over a decade. The exhibition proliferates the dialogue with her most recent exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin: Soil Horizon in New York and Astral Sea in London. It is preceded by two recent museum exhibitions at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas and at SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which both investigate the vibratory, interdependent nature of terrestrial and cosmic matter—treating landscape not simply as physical terrain but as a charged space of psychological, political, and cultural resonance. Concurrently, Fernández’s work is on view in the exhibition Shifting Landscapes at the Whitney Museum in New York.

For over three decades, Teresita Fernández has examined the complexities and paradoxes within landscape—the visible and hidden, celestial and earthly, fierce and alluring, material and ephemeral, ancient and contemporary. Her material intellect is firmly embedded within the sculptural investigations that question how place, land, and landscape are defined. Her work reveals landscapes as embodied sites—at once vast and intimate, private and collective—where poetics and politics intertwine, exposing the layered histories, identities, and cosmologies contained within their strata.

Rather than depicting literal geographies, Fernández’s “Stacked Landscapes”—such as Liquid Horizon 3 (2025)—function as sculptural abstractions and metaphors for perception and the human condition. In keeping with the tenets of color field abstraction, albeit sculpturally, Fernández is deeply engaged with material resonance and its capacity to evoke emotional and psychological depth. Composed of relief horizontal striations in charcoal, sand, and blue pigments on aluminum, these works suggest geological formations that merge with aqueous realms and introspective states. This affective quality recalls Mark Rothko’s compositions—his softly divided, luminous fields of color that emerge from profound emotional inquiry. At the base of each “Stacked Landscape” are crackled slabs of velvety charcoal, anchoring layers of black and blue sand that accumulate like shifting, tactile terrains. These strata transition into vivid, translucent veils of blue, ranging from saturated nocturnal depths to spectral, radiant luminosity. The color moves between immersion and emergence, suggesting a space suspended between the terrestrial and the celestial.

The merging of land and water in the “Stacked Landscapes” serves as a critical point of observation, suggesting both origin and passage—a threshold where interior and exterior conditions converge. Rhythmic transitions between light and dark and between reflection and absorption evoke a meditative awareness of history, migration, and otherworldliness. These works also extend Fernández’s ongoing engagement with maps, which consider land, islands, and continents inseparable from the surrounding waters and spaces. A thin, quivering line of electric blue marks the magnified, abstracted boundary between land and water, darkness and light, underscoring the quiet intimacy Teresita Fernández renders with subtle precision. In this fragile seam, she draws our attention to the unseen—what lies beyond immediate perception.

Water—like soil—is treated as a kind of horizon. It contains its own layered depths and reflective surfaces, embodying an “as above, so below” duality that reframes spatial orientation. In Fernández’s recent Astral Sea series, on view in the gallery, water is a central element. Water absorbs and mirrors, dissolving the boundary between surface and depth, earth and sky, rooting the viewer in a fluid, shifting field rather than a fixed location. This expanded notion of the horizon recurs throughout the exhibition in varied forms. For Teresita Fernández, any single element contains multitudes. Metaphor and memory operate as equal counterparts in her evolving conception of landscape.

The glazed ceramic installation White Phosphorus/Cobalt (2025) echoes the chromatic depth and surface sensitivity of the “Stacked Landscapes” yet diverges in both structure and scale. Composed of thousands of small ceramic cubes, the work forms a shifting matrix of light and color saturation, moving from pale tones at the center to deeper hues at the edges. This tonal gradient generates a field that simultaneously expands and contracts, suggesting a vortex or an astral body. Swirling with blue and white mineral glazes, the title of the work White Phosphorus/Cobalt evokes a range of paradoxical references, from chemical reactions and mining to natural phenomena and the cosmos. These micro-forms repeat and resemble fractals, echoing geological strata, meteorological patterns, or cosmic fields. Through this intimate–infinite dynamic, the work becomes a site of alchemical, political, and environmental significance, implicating the contentious associations with both white phosphorus and cobalt in relation to extraction and destruction.

The exhibition also features nine solid graphite relief panels titled Nocturnal(Milk Sky). Rendered in soft blue tones, these works depict the rhythmic rise and fall of the tide. Polished graphite elements are juxtaposed with ethereal blue and white skies, creating a visual interplay between reflection and atmosphere. Situated in the liminal space between land and sea, the real and the imagined, these panels highlight Fernández’s continued engagement with materials sourced directly from the earth. Graphite, a recurring element in her practice, underscores her conceptual focus on materiality and place. The parenthetical in the title—Milk Sky—evokes both the celestial expanse of the Milky Way and a maternal link between women and the cosmos.

Liquid Horizon offers a resonant meditation on land and water. Through material intricacy and conceptual depth, Teresita Fernández invites viewers into layered environments where boundaries between past and present, self and world, and memory and perception dissolve.

LEHMANN MAUPIN SEOUL

213, Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04349

www.lehmannmaupin.com

James Turrell: The Return @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

James Turrell: The Return

Pace Gallery, Seoul

June 14 - September 27, 2025

James Turrell 

After Effect, 2022 

© James Turrell, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of five recent installations by James Turrell—including a new, never-before-seen, site-specific Wedgework made specifically for this presentation—at its Seoul gallery. Spanning all three floors of the gallery, The Return also features a selection of photographs and works on paper that shed light on the artist’s process for his installations and the construction of his massive Roden Crater project. Marking Turrell’s first solo exhibition in Seoul since 2008, this show is organized as part of Pace’s 65th anniversary year celebration, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions around the world of work by major artists with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships. 

Born in Los Angeles in 1943, James Turrell is a key member of the California Light and Space movement. He has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed “perceptual art,” working with the materiality of light and space. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with light, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. Since his Projection Pieces from the 1960s, his work with light and perception has expanded in various series, including his Skyspaces, which he began creating in 1974, and his Ganzfelds, which he initiated in 1976.

Today, the artist is known worldwide for his immersive installations that, he says, require “seeing yourself seeing.” His work can be found in major museum collections around the globe, including the Museum SAN in Wonju, Korea, which is home to five of his installations; the Bonte Museum on Jeju Island in South Korea; the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island in Japan; the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. With his monumental, ongoing Roden Crater project near Flagstaff, Arizona, James Turrell is forging a large-scale artwork and naked-eye observatory within a dormant volcanic cinder cone in the landscape of the Painted Desert of Northern Arizona.

Arne Glimcher, Pace’s Founder and Chairman, first met James Turrell some 60 years ago, and the gallery has represented him since 2002. The artist’s presentation in Seoul—his first ever solo show at Pace’s space in the Korean capital—is an ode to the longevity of his relationship with Arne Glimcher and Pace. The Return includes a new, never-before-exhibited Wedgework installation—in which planes of projected light intersect within a darkened room, lending light a “thingness” through which the room seems to expand beyond its physical limits—made by James Turrell this year. Also featured are two large, curved glass installations, a circular glass installation, and a diamond-shaped glass installation. In these pieces from the Glassworks series, shifting planes of light give the illusion of infinite depth. Rarely exhibited together, these Glassworks of different sizes and dimensions are installed throughout the Seoul gallery, offering visitors a special opportunity to experience the breadth of the artist’s recent work.

The works on paper complementing these installations, which the artist has been producing over the course of his career, speak to the importance of printmaking in Turrell’s practice. At Pace in Seoul, he is showing his new series of Wedgework prints, which explore the chromatic variations and formal possibilities of the Wedgework installations. Works related to the artist’s Roden Crater project also figure prominently in the exhibition, alongside aquatints and woodcuts that depict qualities of light in Turrell’s 2014 installation Aten Reign at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Artist James Turrell

James Turrell, associated with the Light and Space Movement initiated in the 1960s, has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed perceptual art, investigating the immaterial qualities of light. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with it, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. Since his earliest Projection Pieces (1966–69), his exploration has expanded through various series, including Skyspaces (1974–), Ganzfelds (1976–), and perhaps most notably, his Roden Crater Project (1977–), a large-scale work in a volcanic cinder cone in the Painted Desert region of northern Arizona. Turrell’s practice has also materialized in small-scale works, including architectural models, holograms, and works on paper.

PACE GALLERY SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Nigel Cooke @ Pace Gallery Seoul - "Sea Mirror" Exhibition

Nigel Cooke: Sea Mirror 

Pace Gallery Seoul 

Through May 17, 2025

Nigel Cooke 

Rilke in Rome, 2025 

Oil on linen, 130.5 x 165 cm 

© Nigel Cooke, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents Sea Mirror, an exhibition of new work by Nigel Cooke, at its gallery in Seoul. This show brings together never-before-seen canvases created as part of Cooke’s new experimentations with portrait formats and panoramic scales, as well as a selection of 11 paintings on paper produced on the Spanish island of Formentera. With Sea Mirror Nigel Cooke continues his explorations of memory, myth, and the passage of time through his distinctive visual vocabulary of gesture and touch.

Nigel Cooke is renowned for his evocative, atmospheric paintings that blend figurative and abstract forms within layered compositions. Drawing inspiration from a diverse range of subjects—including literature, paleontology, neuroscience, mythology, and zoology—his work merges personal narratives with broader cultural and natural histories. Through intricate networks of calligraphic marks, Cooke explores the intersection of painting, thinking, and perception, where image and meaning emerge from the convergence of disparate elements to create portraits of psychological and physical spaces alike. His intuitive process is often guided by his experiences in different parts of the world and other autobiographical material, and his works can be found in major collections and institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Tate in London, the Pinault Collection in Paris, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Long Museum in Shanghai, among others. 

In his latest body of work, Nigel Cooke has departed from the bold colors and graphic mark making that have characterized his paintings in recent years. Rendered in cool tones, his new paintings on canvas and on paper, created across Iceland and Spain, are softer, more contemplative and vulnerable compositions than his previous works. Featuring impressionistic lines that flow and emanate across their surfaces, Cooke’s Sea Mirror paintings can be understood in conversation with works by Titian, Rubens, Turner, and other great painters in London’s National Gallery. As ever, one of the central concerns of his practice is the mystery of painting itself—its timelessness, its narrative power, and its emotional and psychological depth.  

A suite of 11 new paintings on paper, created on the Spanish island of Formentera, complements the paintings on view in Sea Mirror. Deeply connected to his recent travels in Iceland, where he painted waterfalls on a daily basis, and his time spent in Formentera, these compositions meditate on notions of transience and transformation, of impermanence and renewal. Creating this group of gouaches on paper on Formentera’s beaches, Nigel Cooke made use of seawater as a material in their production, imbuing each work with the spirit and rhythm of the Mediterranean Sea. In this way, the artist continues his investigations into the poetic resonances of tidal movements and the ways that bodies of water—ever-moving and ever-disappearing—can metaphorically reflect the creative process. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue from Pace Publishing featuring new texts by writer Chloe Aridjis and Marcelle Polednik, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin.

Nigel Cooke (b. 1973) is known for evocative works that merge figurative forms with abstract and elemental atmospherics. Since the late 1990s, Nigel Cooke has explored and stretched the boundaries of figurative painting, creating a highly diverse and distinctive body of work. More recently, his work has assessed this output, moving into a succinct language with which to investigate his wide range of interests. Informed by a range of fields from palaeontology, neuroscience, classical mythology and zoology, the linear construction of Cooke’s latest paintings recalls brain circuitry, the human or animal body and landscape formations simultaneously. The artist is interested in folding familiar dualities such as the mind and body, or the human brain and the natural world, into a single fluid gesture. His organic abstractions are loaded with mammalian and geological fragments, creating an instability and movement in the image as well as an ambiguity between a vast array of natural associations.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Jaider Esbell @ Gladstone Gallery, Seoul

Jaider Esbell

Gladstone Gallery, Seoul

April 1 – May 17, 2025

Gladstone presents the first solo exhibition in South Korea of indigenous artist, activist, and curator JAIDER ESBELL (b. 1979, Normandia—d. 2021, São Sebastião, Brazil). Comprising paintings on canvas and works on paper, spanning the artist’s later years, the show highlights his distinctive visual language of vibrant contrasting patterns across saturated black backgrounds. Esbell’s deep connection with nature, rooted in ecological activism and Macuxi cosmology, permeates every aspect of his work—from the use of plant-based dyes to the depiction of myths and environmental elements such as birds, trees, and cacti. Underscored by his belief in the interconnectedness of all living and natural forms, and the presence of mythological beings and spirits within our complex ecosystem, Esbell’s artistic legacy mobilizes narratives of resistances and champions indigenous epistemologies. 

Esbell challenged the boundaries between art and activism in a practice he named “artivism.” As a key figure in Arte Indígena Contemporânea (Contemporary Indigenous Art), he used his platform to advocate for the recognition of indigenous rights and territories and to create spaces that highlight myriad decolonial perspectives that transcend Western art historical traditions. Driven by his activist efforts, this social movement uplifted artistic production by Afro-Brazilian communities, Indigenous peoples, and other historically marginalized populations. As Esbell’s prominence in the art world grew, he became a critical voice and contributed to the larger community through the establishment of a gallery that served as an artistic and intellectual laboratory, prioritizing institutional collaborations, and curating exhibitions that center indigenous art. 

Esbell’s artistic practice weaves together activism and ecology to affirm Indigenous relationships with the land and urge environmental consciousness. This exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper that forefront narratives highlighting the relationship between living and non-living entities in the natural world through the lens of Macuxi cosmology. Esbell asserts indigenous worldviews and aesthetics through depictions of mythological beings and spirits including Makunaimî, the Macuxi creator of all nature. Works such as Os cactos e jardins de Makunaimí 2 (2021) render vibrant gardens created by Makunaimî, while A festa da chegada das chuvas (2020) celebrates the arrival of rain, capturing the dynamic interplay of nature’s rhythmic cycles. Recurring motifs such as serpents, birds, and cosmic elements function as both cultural signifiers and political metaphors, reflecting concerns towards the exploitative process of extractivism in the Amazon region. Forged through the intersectional dialogue between art, ancestry, and ecology, Esbell’s “artivism” stands as an enduring testament to the importance of creating pathways for indigenous expression within contemporary art frameworks.

JAIDER ESBELL (1979-2021)

Jaider Esbell was born in Normandia, Roraima, Brazil, known today as the indigenous territory, Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol. Jaider Esbell was a member of the Macuxi group and a central figure in the indigenous art movement in Brazil through his work as an artist, educator, writer, curator, and activist. The artist’s multidisciplinary practice spanned painting, writing, drawing, installation and performance, engaging his artistic production as a means of ecological and political activism.

Originally trained as a geographer, Jaider Esbell turned fully to art in 2016 after several years of establishing himself as an educator and advocate for indigenous art and social movements through various curatorial projects and founding the Jaider Esbell Contemporary Indigenous Art Gallery in 2013. In 2021, Esbell's work was shown at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo titled Though it’s dark, still I sing. That same year, he participated as both an artist and guest curator of the exhibition, Moquém_Surarî : Contemporary Indigenous Art, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM São Paulo). In 2022, Jaider Esbell was highlighted prominently in the Arsenal of the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including: Gladstone Gallery, New York (2025); Apresentação: Ruku, Millan, São Paulo (2021); Piatai Datai, Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea e Sesc Centro, Boa Vista, Brazil (2019); and Transmakunaima: o buraco émais embaixo, Memorial dos Povos Indígenas, Brasília, Brazil (2018). Jaider Esbell has also been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro; Pina Contemporânea, São Paulo; Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e da Ecologia (MuBE), São Paulo; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires; Museo Madre, Naples, Italy; Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy; and Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna, among others. Esbell was the recipient of the 2016 PIPA prize, one of Brazil’s most esteemed contemporary art awards, and the Prêmio Funarte de Criação Literária in 2010. Esbell’s works are held in the institutional collections of the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), and Pinacoteca do Estado. 

GLADSTONE SEOUL

760, Samseong-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 06070

www.gladstonegallery.com

Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun, Scott Kahn @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - "Sublime Simulacra" Exhibition curated by Andy St. Louis

Sublime Simulacra

Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun,  Scott Kahn

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

Through March 15, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Sublime Simulacra, a group exhibition curated by Andy St. Louis. Featuring works by Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun, and Scott Kahn, the exhibition speculates on the potential for landscape paintings to generate shifts in the ways that images mediate our experience of the natural environment. 

In Sublime Simulacra, the landscape serves as an inflection point for new modes of perception. The ultimate reality of images was first contested by Plato, who theorized that all representations can be categorized as one of two types: exact (“truthful”) reproductions or deliberately distorted (“false”) likenesses. Jean Baudrillard’s seminal 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation expanded upon Plato’s theory by introducing the notion of the simulacrum, defined as an imitation that fails to make reference to its original. In postmodern artistic discourse, simulacra are typically conceptualized as representations of representations—copies based on other copies—that do not derive from empirical experience, thus blurring the line between the actual and the imaginary. This fundamental inability to distinguish objective reality from subjective representation informs much of postmodernist thought, which polemicizes the mediation of the real through simulacra. According to Jean Baudrillard, the apotheosis of this phenomenon occurs when a representation is so lifelike that it creates its own reality, or hyperreality, effectively destroying the hegemony of the real and rewiring the cognitive connection between perception and belief.

Sublime Simulacra repudiates negative connotations associated with simulacra and embraces broader interpretations of the term as it relates to artistic engagement with the landscape. Through the visual languages of organic abstraction, geometric figuration, realism and surrealism, the paintings on view propose variable relationships between images and the realities they represent, in direct correlation to each artist’s conceptual stance and creative process. By reexamining the dialectics of simulacra through the lens of the landscape, this exhibition spotlights depictions of the ineffable as consummate expressions of authenticity.

For Kim Yun Shin, whose practice spans more than six decades, sculpture and painting have always served as distinct mediums that accomplish the same ends—namely, abstracting her impressions of nature. Whether using chainsaws and hand tools to shape solid masses of wood or brushes and paint to render two-dimensional shapes on canvas, Kim’s works convey a visual world filled with vital energy. She achieves this by attuning her own artistic consciousness with the rhythms and resonances of the natural environment, forging an almost spiritual connection that erases divisions between art and life, subject and object, representation and reality.

Kim’s paintings resist dualistic ontologies and in doing so embrace their intrinsic function as simulacra, despite a conspicuous absence of realism. As expressions of the very essence of the landscape, they operate as unequivocally evocative renderings that reproduce the sensibility of reality vis-à-vis the artist’s embodied experience, lending form to the natural order of the universe through layered compositions filled with saturated colors, organic textures and botanical structures. Contrary to Plato’s condemnation of the simulacrum as a “corrupt” copy of reality, Kim’s works effectively neutralize preconceived notions of image hierarchy by facilitating pluralistic interpretations of the cosmic energies they thematize.

Kim Chang Euk, like so many artists of his generation, progressed through several creative phases throughout his career in tandem with the evolution of modern Korean art in the postwar era. The landscape was an enduring source of inspiration throughout Kim’s lifelong artistic journey, from the geometric and symbolic abstraction that defined the first three decades of his career to the straightforward figuration of his later years. However, it was during the transitional period between these modalities, from the late 1970s to the 1980s, that Kim produced some of his most stirring renderings of the natural environment. These works evince a restrained subjectivity that suffuses their picturesque mountains, forests and streams with arresting immediacy and timeless appeal.

In shifting his purview from imagery that had little bearing on objective reality toward more clearly identifiable landscapes, Kim drew nearer to the realm of simulacra in his paintings while also retaining a certain degree of phenomenological affect. Reality and representation constituted disparate yet parallel perceptual paradigms that he deftly synthesized into a shared, simultaneous perspective rather than insisting on a single, authoritative viewpoint. As such, Kim’s abstracted landscapes do not attempt to copy the “actual” landscape, but nonetheless provoke a comparable sensory response in viewers.

In his prolific painting practice, Hong Soun appropriates press photos and strips them of their primary function by focusing on the landscapes at their periphery. These partial depictions belonging to the artist’s Sidescape series reveal images that are always visible yet remain perpetually overlooked—a strategy that subverts our habituated cognitive framework for construing an image’s meaning by cross-referencing its primary subject matter with its surrounding context. The disorienting effect of expunging a scene’s focal point is reinforced by the naturalistic aesthetic with which Hong paints the landscape and the specificity of each work’s title, which includes the date and location of its source photo. In his most recent body of work, Hong takes photos himself, inevitably imbuing his landscapes with personal memories connected to actual places he has visited, resulting in a series of painterly landscapes titled Unfamiliar Familiar Landscape. 

Throughout his oeuvre, Hong asserts the independence of images as inherently fallible configurations of signifiers that have been divested of their communicative capacity. Instead of striving to render subjective approximations of sensible phenomena or imply viable alternatives to physical reality, his paintings operate as meta-images that preclude the possibility of conflating their simulacra with the landscapes they reconstruct. This dissociation of reality and representation is particularly urgent in light of today’s highly mediated visual culture, which Hong counters by positing that the ultimate truth of an image is derived from its intrinsic unreality as a copy, regardless of how legitimate its outward appearance may seem.

Since the late 1970s, Scott Kahn has continuously developed an uncanny mode of figuration, visualizing ambiguous landscapes through precise applications of paint and subtle manipulations of perspective. This approach generates an infinite depth of focus that contradicts the natural distortions inherent in human optical perception, thereby undermining the realism of his depictions. Kahn’s signature aesthetic sensibility and idiosyncratic compositional logic—including motifs of voluminous foliage casting dappled shadows, prominent pathways and gates leading to indeterminate destinations, peculiar atmospheric conditions and abnormal variations in scale—is redolent of the liminal semi-conscious state between being asleep and being awake that elicits fantastic imaginaries permeated with surreal affect.

Just as dreams are deceptions, so too are simulacra of the highest degree, and Kahn’s paintings are no different. Jean Baudrillard categorized such illusory simulacra as simulations that conflate the real and the illusory such that they become indistinguishable and the original ceases to be relevant. Although this definition implies a negation of meaning, Kahn’s works foster new interpretations due to their ontological incongruity with the physical attributes of specific locations. Hyperreal yet untethered to the real world, they envision the domain of the subconscious, which may be influenced by objective reality but cannot act as its substitute. However, since the visual signifiers that pervade Kahn’s works directly correspond to his own personal lexicon, they remain largely inscrutable for viewers who perceive his otherworldly landscapes as divergent from their own dreamlike reveries.

Whenever the sensory response evoked by the totality of the landscape overwhelms normal perception and approaches the inconceivable, Jean Baudrillard’s dialectics of simulacra collapse under the weight of the transcendent sublime. Given the practical impossibility of reproducing the moment-to-moment impressions that lend the landscape its essential ineffability, it is no wonder that artists abandon the notion of objective authenticity in their representations of the natural environment—they are compelled to break certain rules that differentiate reason and imagination, forging simulacra that recreate reality on their own terms and invite the viewer to share in this “unreal” experience.

“The simulacrum implies huge dimensions, depths and distances that the observer cannot dominate,” reflected Gilles Deleuze in his 1990 essay Plato and the Simulacrum, which formalized the phenomenology of the sublime in relation to Baudrillard’s theory. “The simulacrum includes within itself the differential point of view, and the spectator is made part of the simulacrum, which is transformed and deformed according to his point of view. In short, folded within the simulacrum there is a process of going mad, a process of limitlessness…” Nowhere is this description more salient than in depictions of the landscape, which cannot serve as copies of reality because they manifest a mode of subjective experience that lacks a rational corollary—an ineluctable sublime. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea 04349

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Sublime Simulacra - Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun,  Scott Kahn

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, January 22 – March 15, 2025

Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlovelana @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - "Illusive Places" Exhibition Curated by Cy Schnabel

Illusive Places 

Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlovelana 

Curated by Cy Schnabel

Pace Gallery, Seoul

May 11 - June 15,  2024

Alejandro Garmendia 

Jessica Descending & Ascending in the North Sea, 2007 

© Alejandro Garmendia 

Pace presents Illusive Places: Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlov, a group show curated by Cy Schnabel, at its gallery in Seoul. This exhibition brings together works by artists who, in one way or another, share an interest in reinventing landscape painting. These five artists—Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, and Milko Pavlov—use landscape as a point of departure to create nuanced approaches to subject matter, form, and content. 

Throughout this exhibition, natural settings turn into imaginary realms that suggest new perspectives of the physical world and life in general. An abstracted sense of space in the pictures on view gives way to unstable compositions that are charged with desire, fantasy, and sometimes loneliness. A range of psychological views carry their own resonances and connect through each artist’s interest in presenting a distinct irreality in their work. Utopias, nightmares, hallucinations, and fragmented memories all materialize in these illusive places.

Cy Schnabel

Cy Schnabel (b. New York, 1993) is an independent curator and the founder and director of Villa Magdalena, a gallery based in San Sebastian, Spain since 2020. The gallery focuses on contemporary Spanish painting and works with international mid-career and emerging artists. In 2017, Schnabel worked as an assistant curator at the Centro Cultural de España en México (CCEMX) in Mexico City, making his curatorial debut with the group show Horizontes Imaginarios. In 2018, Schnabel co-curated the posthumous retrospective Alejandro Garmendia: Paisajes, enigma, y melancolía at the Sala Kubo Kutxa in San Sebastian. Schnabel has presented two exhibitions at Galería Mascota in Mexico City—Mie Yim: New Works on Paper (2022) and Lucy Mullican: Veils (2023)—which marked each artist’s first solo exhibition in Mexico. In collaboration with Spazio Amanita, Schnabel curated Felicidad Moreno: Form and Formlessness (Miami, 2022) and Cristina Lama: Música para un murciélago (New York, 2023), both artists’ first solo presentations in the United States. He was also the author and co-curator of Schnabel and Spain: Anything Can Be a Model for a Painting at the CAC Málaga, a 2022 survey of 23 paintings made by his father between 1997 and the present, showing the artist's works in the context of Spanish painting and the evolution of his practice during this period.

Cy Schnabel’s curatorial writings on the five artists in the show follow below.

Thomas Chapman

After experimenting with shaped canvases for more than 20 years, Thomas Chapman (b. 1975, San Diego, California) has returned to figurative painting, developing a style that is heavily influenced by his drawings of everyday life. Like his Lake Paintings, the works on view in Illusive Places are voyeuristic studies of leisurely moments. Layered imagery resulting in a dense atmospheric haze makes the figures who populate these invented scenes barely perceptible. Throughout his oeuvre, found fabrics, collage, stolen typographies, markers, paint, pencil markings, glue, and many other elements comprise the surfaces of his paintings. The unorthodox shapes of some of Chapman’s early canvases are inspired by a variety of subjects: astronomy, mythology, and ancient history. Taking an unconventional approach to painting, Chapman makes use of supports and many layers of sometimes conflicting visual information as common features in his diverse practice.

Alejandro Garmendia

The two works on view by Alejandro Garmendia (b. 1959, d. 2017, San Sebastian, Spain) are from his Pinturas Sucias (Dirty Paintings) series. But why dirty? Surely it has to do with the murky appearance of these paintings. Their messy execution with a muddy color palette, which reflects the artist’s embrace of accidents and imperfections as part of his practice, confirm that his process for these works is consistent with their conceptual underpinnings. The very idea of a landscape as “dirty” suggests that Garmendia was questioning the legitimacy of the act of painting itself, and, more specifically, the impulse to make something even remotely pastoral in contemporary times. This was yet another ironic and subversive gesture, illustrating an awareness of the risk involved in his chosen subject, given that the pictures seem so opposed to avant-garde tendencies and the general trajectory of contemporary art. In any case, these works serve as pretexts to his experimentations with the surrealist lineage he so admired, along with other art historical references. Garmendia documented the nonexistent, created physically impossible compositions, and ultimately presented a distanced metaphysical vision of the world that evokes estrangement and disorientation.

Louis Jacquot

Louis Jacquot’s (b. 1994, Paris, France) practice hinges on relationships between objects and pictures. The artist’s sculptural paintings combine minimalist gestures with iconographic elements. Blinky (2022) and Imi (2022), the two works present in this exhibition, turn intimate spaces and domestic objects on their sides to create illusive perspectives. In Jacquot’s hands, the intimate subject transcends the image to encompass the entire painting. Both the material— bedding—and the shape of the canvases—like that of a pocket notebook—speak to direct contact with the body. In the past, during his BFA at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the artist maintained a workspace more akin to a woodworker’s shop than a painter’s studio. He avoided his “own” mark-making in favor of objects that were practically devoid of any graphic elements. In the few cases where pigments are applied, Jacquot chooses images that could belong to anyone. His previous works show an impersonal vocabulary of generic found symbols appropriated from the street—any universal emblems became subjects of interest for him.

Lucy Mullican

Lucy Mullican’s (b. 1994, New York) paintings use the horizon line as a compositional device to create a tension between gravity and the human spirit, which, in contrast to the former, is always in a state of ascension. We can trace maps of ethereal worlds in her works, which are ultimately self-portraits. The artist has experienced a spiritual transformation that is evident in her departure from painting waterfalls, islands, and rivers in favor of a more contemplative, inward consideration of the mind and the organs. Exterior environments blend with bodily forms, creating anthropomorphic landscapes. Her delicate paintings on wood consist of many layers of mineral pigments and pulsating lines, which create translucent surfaces. What the artist refers to as “pockets” or “holes” within her compositions function like portals, allowing the viewer to travel back and forth between pictures. The natural pigments of the watercolor and the wood receivers become one, reflecting the artist’s innate ability to understand her medium and employ technical fluidity. Mullican’s penetrating vision goes beyond the surface to reveal what we cannot see and bring us closer to what we feel. Transient moments flooded with light embody the artist’s representation of spirit.

Milko Pavlov

Milko Pavlov’s (b. 1956, Aytos, Bulgaria) paintings depict an imaginary natural world where rock formations, trees, water, and other organic matter have been rendered unrecognizable. The artist’s pictorial blend of naturalistic representation and abstraction creates a vast scale within the picture plane that is an everchanging way of seeing. In Pavlov’s oeuvre, form, surface, and composition develop in response to paint itself as a subject. His black and white frottage works—a technique he now applies to canvas—are continuations of the graphic work he was making in Bulgaria in the early 1990s. The artist’s colorful palette derives from his early exposure to 18th and 19th century Bulgarian Icon painters, which shifted his attention towards religious works of art instead of assimilating formal ideas related to the socialist realist aesthetic dominant in the country in the 1970s. With his titles, Pavlov is interested in a conceptual dimension that reflects an intersection of different moments in time. In many cases, his artwork titles can contain multiple dates yet to come, as with 2133-2 МРП 2042 (2024) and B.V 2099 МРП 2065 (2022), both of which are included in the exhibition at Pace in Seoul. Through these references to futuristic times, Pavlov is challenging the life expectancy of everything: himself, the viewer, the painting itself. The way the artist organizes space in his paintings—in other words, the composition—loosely resembles mountains or landscapes, a subconscious gesture which perhaps illustrates the mountainous nature of his native country.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 

www.pacegallery.com