Frieze Seoul

Upcoming
Sep 3 – Sep 6, 2025
Seoul

ART FAIR DETAILS

Frieze Seoul
Booth A10
COEX
Sep 3 – 6, 2025

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Pace’s presentation at the upcoming edition of Frieze Seoul will explore international histories of abstraction through works by 20th century and contemporary artists alike.

Historic works by Adolph Gottlieb and Yoo Youngkuk will anchor the gallery’s presentation. New paintings by Friedrich Kunath and Lauren Quin—both of whom joined Pace’s program this year—will figure prominently on the booth.The gallery will also spotlight works by Mary Corse, Elmgreen & Dragset, Pam Evelyn, Alicja Kwade, Kylie Manning, Kenjiro Okazaki, Adam Pendleton, Michal Rovner, and Mika Tajima at Frieze Seoul. During the run of the fair, an exhibition by James Turrell will continue at Pace’s Seoul gallery.

Highlights on Pace’s booth at Frieze Seoul include:

Expanding, a large-scale 1962 painting by the late American artist Adolph Gottlieb—a key figure of Abstract Expressionism—will anchor the booth ahead of the gallery’s exhibition of his work in Seoul in October

Water, a 1979 painting by the pioneering Korean abstractionist Yoo Youngkuk, will be shown publicly for the first time as part of Pace’s presentation at the fair

An evocative new landscape painting, We’ll Be Here Soon (2025), by Friedrich Kunath, who will open his first solo exhibition with Pace in New York this November

Saline (2025), a new, intimately scaled painting by Lauren Quin, who joined the gallery’s program this summer and will have her debut solo show with Pace in Los Angeles next year

A new sculpture, Hong Kong – Seoul (2025), by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who, following their recent presentations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, will open their first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Pace on September 13

A selection of paintings by Kenjiro Okazaki, who investigates time, space, and perception through his unique language of abstraction and recently presented a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

Michal Rovner’s new video work Reflection (2025), which, inspired by Korean landscapes, meditates on the passage of time and collective memory through layered images and rhythmic patterns

Featured Works

Adolph Gottlieb

b. 1903, New York
d. 1974, New York

Adolph Gottlieb’s Expanding (1962) is a commanding example of the artist’s Burst paintings. In this nearly eight-foot canvas, a radiant blue orb is set against a sea-green field, its edges hazy, as though pulsing in and out of focus. Below it, a jagged rust-colored burst anchors the composition. The contrast between the two forms—one atmospheric and immaterial, the other immediate and graphic—creates a potent sense of tension and equilibrium. Balancing thick areas of paint with transparency achieved through the application of turpentine with a rag, Gottlieb created the effect of a fluid space for the orb, painted with a glaze that increases the reflection of light.¹ The Burst paintings, which Gottlieb began in 1956 and continued through the rest of his life, marked a formal and conceptual distillation in his practice. Building on the spatial and chromatic arrangements of his earlier Imaginary Landscapes (1951–57), the Bursts introduced a more pared-down compositional format: a celestial disc above a chaotic eruption, aligned along a central axis. Within this structure, Gottlieb found infinite variation. Pairing emotional intensity with formal restraint, the series channels the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionism while embracing the luminous, immersive chromatic sensibility of Color Field painting. “I want to express the utmost intensity of the color, bring out the quality, make it expressive,” Gottlieb said. “At the same time, I would also like to bring out a certain immaterial character that it can have, so that it exists as sensation and a feeling that it will carry nuances not necessarily inherent in the color, which are brought out by juxtaposition.”²

1. Adolph Gottlieb quoted in Robert Doty, “Part II,” in Adolph Gottlieb (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art), 21.

2. Ibid, 21–22.

Yoo Youngkuk

b. 1916, Uljin-gun, South Korea
d. 2002, Seoul

Yoo Youngkuk’s Water (1979) is a distinctive work that reflects a pivotal turn in the artist’s decades-long pursuit of distilling the natural world into pure form. Following a major surgery in 1977, Yoo shifted away from the hard-edged abstraction that had defined much of his earlier practice, giving way to softer contours and more legible references to land, sea, and sky. In Water, mosaic-like dots in brilliant blues and turquoise form a band across the center of the painting, evoking the sea shimmering beneath the night sky or the inner radiance of bioluminescence. Curving ribbons of cool color define the horizon, while darker forms anchor the composition below. Though it departs from the geometric rigor of his earlier compositions, Water remains rooted in Yoo’s core commitment to capturing nature through abstraction. A luminous example of this mature style, the resulting landscape is vital and mysterious; as art critic Andrew Russeth describes, Yoo was “constructing a kind of personal universe, where everything is just as it should be, and then he is inviting his beholders to inhabit it.”¹

1. Andrew Russeth, “Born Again: Yoo Youngkuk at Home,” in A Journey to the Infinite: Yoo Youngkuk (Seoul: Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation, 2024), 21.

Friedrich Kunath

b. 1974, Chemnitz, Germany

In We'll Be Here Soon (2025) Friedrich Kunath elevates the characteristic anachronisms of German Romantic painting for modern day. A Jurassic sunset and landscape are augmented by a playful, cartoonish bungalow and a commercial jetliner pulling the titular banner. The pastoral nostalgia characteristic of 19th century landscape painting is reimagined by the artist for the media and advertising age. Romanticism's longing for a lost past is transformed by Kunath's longing for a dreamlike imaginary future, reinforced by the jetliner's message.

Lauren Quin

b. 1992, Los Angeles

Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen | b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark
Ingar Dragset | b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway

Kenjiro Okazaki

b. 1955, Tokyo, Japan

Michal Rovner

b. 1957, Tel Aviv, Israel

On View and Upcoming in Seoul

On View

James Turrell

The Return

Jun 14 – Sep 27, 2025

Seoul

Upcoming

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki

Oct 30 – Dec 27, 2025

Seoul

IN THE STREAM OF LIFE by Lawrence Weiner

A New Collaboration from Pace and Sikijang

Pace Gallery and the Seoul-based craft gallery Sikijang are pleased to present a special collaboration between American artist Lawrence Weiner’s estate and contemporary ceramicist Heami Lee. For this project—which extends from Pace’s exhibition of Weiner’s work at its Seoul gallery in 2024—Lee has created moon jars inscribed with the words IN THE STREAM OF LIFE, a phrase Weiner drew from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion that “words have meaning only in the stream of life.”

Learn More

To inquire about any of the artists or works featured here, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

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