Showing posts with label Seoul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seoul. Show all posts

31/10/25

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 Art
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

14/10/25

Lari Pittman @ Lehmann Maupin Seoul - 'Caprichos and Nocturnes' Exhibition

Lari Pittman
Caprichos and Nocturnes
Lehmann Maupin Seoul
November 6 – December 27, 2025

Lehmann Maupin Seoul presents Los Angeles–based artist Lari Pittman’s solo exhibition Caprichos and Nocturnes on the heels of his recent museum surveys Mirror & Metaphor at the Jeonnam Museum of Art in Gwangyang, South Korea, and Magic Realism at the Long Museum in Shanghai, China, both curated by Rochelle Steiner. While these retrospectives traced the past decade of Pittman’s career, this presentation focuses on his Nocturne and Capricho series. Created in 2015, both series share a visual language of symbolic text and art historical references as Lari Pittman interweaves literature, history, craft, and decorative arts into intricate compositions. 

Lari Pittman is known for his densely layered painting style, marked by a personal lexicon of signs and symbols such as bells, eggs, and ropes. Often working on a large scale, Pittman has an innate ability to compose works in which every element holds equal space and significance. In his Capricho series, he depicts violence and decay alongside utopian fantasy, drawing on references to Francisco Goya (1764–1828; Spain) and Emily Dickinson (1830–1886; United States of America). The Nocturne series, by contrast, envisions a suite of musical nocturnes translated into paintings. Together, this particular body of work creates an interwoven narrative that reveals the artist’s exploration of beauty, violence, and the complex interplay between fantasy and reality.

The Nocturne series unfolds as a visual analogue to the musical form, offering romantic, dreamlike reflections on the mysteries of night. Against dark, star-strewn grounds, Lari Pittman layers recurring motifs of eggs and hybrid robotic creatures, conjuring scenes that feel at once ancient and futuristic. His restrained palette of mauves, earthy yellows, greens, and browns imbues the works with a quiet intensity, while the recurring egg motif suggests regeneration. Departing from his long-standing engagement with horror vacui, these works introduce a sense of visual openness, allowing the compositions to breathe. In Nocturne #9 (2015), a white, intricately patterned figure floats upside down against a black ground with glowing orbs and misty, galaxy-like forms. Fine lines and geometric markings give the figure a human-mechanical quality, while web-like threads and bright halos suggest drifting weightlessness and tranquil mystery, exploring night as a threshold between clarity and obscurity and balancing apparent chaos with meticulous structural order to suggest a cosmos where past and future share equal footing.

By contrast, the Capricho series adopts a more somber register, juxtaposing violence and decay with utopian fantasy to investigate trauma and power as culturally and historically transmitted structures. Here, Lari Pittman pays homage to Los Caprichos, the late-18th-century etchings by Francisco Goya that exposed the brutality of human behavior and the oppressive social conditions of his time. He also embeds the works with excerpts from Emily Dickinson’s poetry—specifically regarding the body, pain, and death. Pittman’s visual juxtaposition of the Spanish painter with the American poet, whose sensibility was marked by the austerity of Puritan New England, can be read as a reflection of his own complex cultural formation as the child of a Catholic Colombian mother and an Atheist American father. In Capricho #8 (2015), jagged lightning forms, fragmented figures, and night-sky specks collide with oversized domino tiles, while angular, mask-like faces and contorted bodies emerge in bursts of electric blue, yellow, and earthy green. Hand-painted lines from Dickinson’s poem on the atrocities of the Civil War, “They Dropped Like Flakes” (1862), trace the borders of the composition, infusing the work with poetic resonance and apocalyptic intensity.

Through these two series, Lari Pittman combines symbolism, literary references, and art historical sources into compositions that balance structure and emotion. By translating the nocturne into a meditation on night and regeneration, and by revisiting Goya’s Caprichos through Dickinson’s reflections on mortality, Pittman situates painting as a space where history, imagination, and the present intersect. 

Previous exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Seoul:
Through October 25, 2025

Previous exhibition of LARI PITTMAN at Lehmann Maupin Seoul:
March 15 – May 7, 2022

LEHMANN MAUPIN SEOUL
213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea 04349

20/09/25

The Seoul Issue, Aperture Magazine, Fall 2025, No. 260 - A kaleidoscopic portrait of Seoul through the eyes of South Korean photographers

The Seoul Issue
Aperture Magazine
No. 260, Fall 2025  

Heeseung Chung, Aperture Magazine, Seoul Issue
The Seoul Issue, Aperture
Magazine 
No. 260, Fall 2025
Photography by Heeseung Chung
Image courtesy of Aperture

Aperture has released “The Seoul Issue,” a kaleidoscopic portrait of Seoul through the eyes of its extraordinary photographers. The latest entry in the magazine’s series of city-focused editions—following Accra, Delhi, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Tokyo, and São Paulo—this issue brings together modern and contemporary image makers who embody the varied and flourishing photography scene of South Korea’s capital, a megacity now at the center of contemporary art and culture.

Yongjoon Choi, Aperture Magazine, Seoul Issue
The Seoul Issue, Aperture
 Magazine 
No. 260, Fall 2025
Photography by Yongjoon Choi
Image courtesy of Aperture

“The Seoul Issue” introduces some of Korea’s most influential photographers to an international audience. In an in-depth interview, Heinkuhn Oh discusses his uncanny portraits of teenagers, soldiers, and other social types who speak to collective and personal anxiety in Korean society. Aperture’s editor in chief, Michael Famighetti, profiles Bohnchang Koo, who obsessively collects and photographs moon jars, masks, figurines, and other talismanic objects, treating them as conduits to Korean history. Hyunji Nam catches up with Nikki S. Lee, who dropped out of New York’s art world and returned to Seoul after establishing herself as an enfant terrible in the 1990s with portraits of herself embedded in various subcultures. And critic Andrew Russeth celebrates the rich legacy of Space, Korea’s longest-running architecture magazine and a record of Seoul’s shape-shifting skyline.

Suntage Noh, Aperture Magazine, Seoul Issue
The Seoul Issue, Aperture
 Magazine 
No. 260, Fall 2025
Photography by Suntag Noh
Image courtesy of Aperture

Yezoi Hwang, Aperture Magazine, Seoul Issue
The Seoul Issue, Aperture
 Magazine 
No. 260, Fall 2025
Photography by Yezoi Hwang
Image courtesy of Aperture

Many of Seoul’s photographers grapple with the geopolitics and tensions of the past and the anxieties of the present, among them a cold war with North Korea and an ongoing crisis of democracy. While photojournalist Suntag Noh has spent decades depicting the region’s ideological rifts and contradictions with a dark absurdity, Yezoi Hwang hit the streets last winter, photographing large-scale protests that began when a now-impeached president declared martial law this past December. Yezoi Hwang imbues political subject matter with intimacy, as does the pathbreaking feminist photographer Youngsook Park, whose lyrical 1960s photographs are featured here.

Writer and curator Jaeyong Park contributes an essay on how a younger generation of photographers is exploring Seoul’s postmodern relationship to images, arguing that the city, through its profusion of screens that are “everywhere and nowhere,” has become a “prototype for a post-photographic future.” Cover artist Heeseung Chung grapples with this deluge of images by treating each of her eclectic, playful photographs as incomplete, steering us toward the mysterious gaps between pictures, whereas Chorong An’s recombinant photographs evoke life under the regime of K-beauty.

Weaving together multiple timelines and perspectives, “The Seoul Issue” is an essential resource for understanding how Korean photographers have mapped and continue to map the past, present, and future of a city defined by restless, dizzying transformation.

APERTURE

31/08/25

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
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
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
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
Kim Tschang-yeul
Rite, 1965
Oil paint on canvas, 162×130cm 
MMCA collection
Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul
Kim Tschang-yeul
Rite, 1966 
Oil paint on canvas, 162×137 cm 
MMCA collection
Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul
Kim Tschang-yeul
Installation view at MMCA
Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul
Kim Tschang-yeul
Untitled, 1969 
Oil paint on canvas, 20.5×20.7 cm 
MMCA collection
Image provided by MMCA 

Kim Tschang-yeul
Kim Tschang-yeul
Composition, 1970
Acrylic paint and cellulose lacquer on canvas, 150×150cm
Private collection
Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul
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
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
Kim Tschang-yeul
Waterdrops, 1979
Oil paint on canvas, 80.5×100cm 
Private collection
Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul
Kim Tschang-yeul
Waterdrops, 1986
Acrylic paint and oil paint on canvas, 73×50 cm 
Private collection
Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul
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
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
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

Related Posts:

The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982
Tina Kim Gallery, New York, May 5 - June 21, 2025

Tina Kim Gallery, New York, September 9 - October 16, 2021 

19/08/25

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
Chun Hyucklim 
Landscape of Tongyeong, 1992
Oil paint on canvas, 130×160cm
Tongyeong City Hall

Nam Kwan
Nam Kwan 
Refugees, 1957 
Oil paint on canvas, 160.5×130.5cm 
Private collection

Kim Junghyun
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
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
Heo Geon 
Cultural Landscape, 1945 
Ink and color on paper, 56×48cm
Private collection

Lee Sangbeom
Lee Sangbeom 
Returning at Dawn, 1945 
Ink on paper, 129×256cm 
Private collection

Yoo Youngkuk
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
Kim Won 
Title unknown, 1954
Oil paint on canvas, 102×177.7cm 
MMCA

Byeon Gwansik
Byeon Gwansik 
Spring in Muchang, 1955
Ink and color on paper, 181×357cm 
MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection

Shin Youngheon
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
Yoon Jungsik
Spring, 1975
Oil paint on canvas, 41×53cm
MMCA

Choi Youngrim
Choi Youngrim
Spring Garden, 1982 
Oil paint and soil on canvas, 127×191cm
Seoul Museum

Kim Jonghwi
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

15/08/25

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

25/06/25

James Turrell: The Return @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

James Turrell: The Return
Pace Gallery, Seoul
June 14 - September 27, 2025

James Turrell
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

01/05/25

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

Nigel Cooke: Sea Mirror 
Pace Gallery Seoul 
Through May 17, 2025

Nigel Cooke Painting
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

06/04/25

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