KIAF Seoul

Past
Oct 13 – Oct 17, 2021
Seoul

Art Fair Details:

KIAF Seoul
COEX 1F, Hall A&B
Oct 13 – 17, 2021

Online Preview:

Oct 13 – 17, 2021

Connect:

(opens in a new window) @pacegallery
(opens in a new window) @kiafseoul

Above: Adolph Gottlieb, Ambient Green, 1962, oil on linen © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NY

For KIAF Seoul 2021, we are pleased to present works by major international artists and collectives including Alexander Calder, Adolph Gottlieb, Mary Corse, teamLab, DRIFT, Robert Longo, Song Dong, and Li Songsong, as well as pieces by major Korean artists such as Kim Whanki, Lee Kun-yong, and Park Re-hyun. Our presentation spans various mediums, featuring paintings, drawings, sculpture, and photography.

Among the highlights in the presentation is Brent Wadden’s vibrant geometric work Untitled (2020), which contrasts with the dark center of Mary Corse’s Untitled (White Black with Black Light) (1998). Also on view are sculptures by Joel Shapiro, who had a solo show at Pace in Seoul earlier this year, and a kinetic sculpture by Alexander Calder, one of the most important artists of the 20th century who is best known for his mobiles.

Paintings by the pioneering Korean abstractionist Kim Whanki and famed American artist Adolph Gottlieb are hung adjacently, highlighting these artists’ significance in the history of Abstract Expressionism. Kim was deeply influenced by Gottlieb, as evidenced by his use of color and form. Both works are masterpieces dating to the 1960s, and they are presented in collaboration with the Whanki Foundation and the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation. The presentation also features works from the Bodyscape series by Lee Kun-yong, the founder of the Korean avant-garde movement who is widely known for his innovations in performance art, and works by Park Re-hyun, one of the first modern female painters in Korea. As a leading gallery in Asia, Pace strives to support Korean artists and introduce their works to a global audience.

Notable artworks by innovative artists using digital technology include photos by Trevor Paglen, who was awarded the 2018 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, and Life Survives by the Power of Life II (2020) by teamLab, an interdisciplinary group known for its striking, interactive installations.

Featured Highlights

Alexander Calder

Mary Corse

Over the last five decades, Mary Corse has investigated perception, properties of light, and ideas of abstraction in her practice. Her pioneering approach to painting explores the medium’s capacity to utilize and refract light through subtly gestural and precisely geometric works. For the artist, the essence of painting addresses underlying structures of visual experiences and their position within space and time. Corse often emphasizes that her paintings are “not on the wall,” but instead suspended in a visual relationship between viewer and canvas.

Corse has pursued an interest in perception since the late 1960s, when she began incorporating glass microspheres—an industrial material used to enhance pavement markings—into the surfaces of her paintings. This element, present in Untitled (White Black with Black Light), 1998, reflects and refracts light depending on the viewer’s position relative to the optically rich surface.

Untitled (White Black with Black Light) by Mary Corse — Mary Corse, *Untitled (White Black with Black Light)*, 1998, acrylic and glass microspheres on canvas, 36-1/8" × 44-1/8" (91.8 cm × 112.1 cm)

Latifa Echakhch

Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb began his Burst paintings in 1957 and concentrated on the series almost exclusively until 1960, after which he revisited his Imaginary Landscapes, focusing on these two bodies of work simultaneously until the end of his life. In his final cycle of paintings, the Burst works featured registers of calligraphic brushstrokes and patterned shapes, with simplified compositions aligned along a single vertical axis. In each painting from the series, a disc-like orb with defined contours hovers over a gestural, chaotic “explosion” within an atmospheric field. From this series, Gottlieb’s masterwork Ambient Green (1962) was first exhibited at the famed Sidney Janis Gallery in New York the same year it was made. Reflecting Gottlieb’s unique technical and conceptual approaches to gestural and Color field abstraction, Ambient Green depicts an aqueous disc executed in a radiant blue emerging from a muted green background. Undefined at its edges, this hazy orb hovers over an expressive burst and black cluster in the bottom left of the canvas.

This central graphic form contains splatters and scrapes, showing Gottlieb’s painterly process. The large-scale painting draws the viewer’s attention to the dynamic space between the cool meditative tones of the disc and the warmth of the abstract forms below it.

The effect is both emotional and phenomenological, as the forms oscillate between spatial depth and planes of focus. Ambient Green reveals Gottlieb’s mastery of formal and conceptual notions of chaos and order, which prompt an inner experience in the viewer and suggest representations of the Earth and nascent forms of life.

Lee Kun-yong

A key figure in the Korean avant-garde movement of the 1960s, Lee Kun-Yong is widely known for his innovations in performance art. The artist’s practice spans sculpture, installation, video, and painting, and his boundary-pushing performances have often intersected with these mediums. Lee’s ongoing Bodyscape series, which he began in 1976 and continues to produce today, challenges conventional modes of painting and art making. The abstract works in this series reflect the artist’s interest in documenting the physicality of painting. For these pieces, he approaches his canvases from various vantage points—behind and in front of the painting—to create a series of spontaneous and expressive marks.

This new work from the series features robust swathes of yellow, brown, and white forming elegant drips that extend towards the bottom of the canvas. Bodyscape 76-1-2021 (2021) is among the latest pieces in the artist’s historic and highly experimental Bodyscape series.

Bodyscape 76-3-2021 by Lee Kun-Yong — Lee Kun-Yong, *Bodyscape 76-3-2021*, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 130.2 cm × 162 cm (51-1/4" × 63-3/4")

Bodyscape 76-3-2021 (2021) belongs to the Bodyscape series, in which the artist stands behind or adjacent to the canvas and moves his arms to create a composition using the limitations of his body as a guide. The resulting works are traces of his movements, and they are often displayed alongside photographs of the artist’s unique process. Of his heart shaped paintings, Lee has said, “I didn't expect my movements to result in a heart shape, but my body created such beauty. These are drawn by my body, not my mind. It is a phenomenon that happens where my body meets the plane.” In this sense, the body and its physical performance are as much a part of the final painting as the canvas itself.

Bodyscape 76-1-2016 by Lee Kun-Yong — Lee Kun-Yong, *Bodyscape 76-1-2016*, 2016, acrylic on paper, 56 cm × 76 cm (22-1/16" × 29-15/16")

Bodyscape 76-1-2017 by Lee Kun-Yong — Lee Kun-Yong, *Bodyscape 76-1-2017*, 2017, Acrylic, pencil on paper, 38 cm × 46 cm (14-15/16" × 18-1/8")

Robert Longo

Yoshitomo Nara

Kohei Nawa

Re-Hyun Park

Pioneering modern Korean painter Park Re-Hyun’s practice spanned ink-wash painting, drawing, printmaking, and tapestry, and she was known for her boundless experimentations with traditional mark-making materials and forms of abstraction.

Work (1963) is emblematic of the artist’s mature paintings of the 1960s on Korean Hanji paper—a handmade material made from the inner bark of mulberry trees that has been utilized as far back as the 3rd century. The pulp-like fibers of the textured paper soak pigments in distinctive patterns, capturing the fluid and organic movement of the material as well as the restraint of the artist’s hand. As seen in the present work, billowing forms emerge across the minimal composition—vibrant blues and gradated greys and blacks bleed together and separate, creating a bruise-like abstraction.

A delicate fortitude is rendered in these booming shapes, which look like rolling clouds. Evidenced in this work are Park’s focus and empathetic mindset. On the development of her practice from abstracted works to printmaking, the artist said in 1974, “Seeking to escape the limitations of traditional Korean paper, I became fascinated with the different printmaking techniques, each of which is very detailed and concrete. I realized that technique, which is often seen as the opposite of art, can significantly enhance artistry by expanding one’s methods of expression in surprising ways.”

Work by Re-Hyun Park — Re-Hyun Park, *Work*, 1963, coloring on paper, 150 cm × 135.5 cm (59-1/16" × 53-3/8")

Joel Shapiro

Brent Wadden

Synthesizing traditions of painting, design, craft and folk art, Brent Wadden’s work is the antithesis of mass-produced, machine-made textiles. At every stage of creation, from sourcing the yarn to stretching the finished material over a raw canvas, Wadden is in control. Much like a painter using different types of paint, Wadden uses an array of yarn—including cotton, wool, acrylic, and handwoven fibers—to imbue his artworks with a sense of depth and tangibility. Seen from afar, Untitled (2020) might be mistaken for an abstract painting, but up close the work reveals a multitude of handwoven hues and textures. In this way, Wadden’s expert handling of material, composition, and color confounds viewers’ expectations of media and discipline, surface, and texture. Wadden’s work celebrates what might be considered mistakes or imperfections in another context by rejecting seamless joints or perfect alignments. These are purposeful signals to viewers that the work results from a labor-intensive, diligent practice that Wadden has honed for many years. Wadden has not only formed a method that is distinctively his own, but he also collapses the hierarchies of disciplines, interrogating the boundaries that separate painting from textile, art from craft, and decorative from functional.

All Works

George Condo

DRIFT

David Hockney

Alex Katz

Li Songsong

Trevor Paglen

This dreamy dye sublimation print by Trevor Paglen exemplifies the artist’s intense and ongoing interest in image making and the history of landscape photography. Titled CLOUD #603 Watershed (2019), the work depicts a sky of deep blues, purples, and pinks to which Paglen has added lines and geometric shapes. These dynamic, understated abstractions accent and complement the formation of a cloud, calling attention to its idiosyncratic and fragmented components. An elongated, white cloud emerges and disappears amid a rush of color in the present work, appearing most legibly in the center of the composition, where Paglen has situated his abstractions. In these ways, CLOUD #603 Watershed reflects the artist’s longstanding investigations of that which is hidden and his use of technology to reveal obfuscated information or images. CLOUD #603 Watershed was previously exhibited at Pace Gallery in Geneva as part of the artist’s 2019 solo exhibition Trevor Paglen: The Shape of Clouds.

Bloom (#a8866d) by Trevor Paglen — Trevor Paglen, *Bloom (#a8866d)*, 2020, dye sublimation print, 54" × 40-1/2" (137.2 cm × 102.9 cm) 55-1/8" × 41-5/8" × 2" (140 cm × 105.7 cm × 5.1 cm), framed

Trevor Paglen's complex and pioneering work examines the systems and technologies that shape society. Of particular interest to the artist are computing systems that collect, interpret, and operationalize data that defines and tracks identity, movement, and habits. Paglen’s Bloom series recalls the vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which symbolic objects such as flowers remind viewers of mortality, the fragility of life, and the vanity of worldly pleasures. In contrast to the vanitas works of bygone eras, Paglen’s pieces play with these symbolic tropes, bringing them into the present day and addressing new signifiers of mortality in the digital era. Bloom (#a8866d) (2020), is part of a series of large-scale photographs that depict flower formations conceptualized by various computer vision algorithms and created to analyze the constituent parts of real-life photographs. The colors and shapes in the images that make up the work reflect what the AI has learned about flowers in general. The varying densities within the final image do not represent naturally occurring colors so much as what the AI has previously identified as a “flower.”

Song Dong

teamLab

Whanki Kim

Pioneering Korean abstract artist Kim Whanki is known for lyrical works that celebrate the natural world as well as his role as a founding member of the Korean avant-garde movement New Realism. This movement sought to convey the essence of nature through abstraction and poetry, a central aim of Kim’s practice. Born in 1913 in South Korea, the artist was deeply influenced by late Cubism, the work of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and his mentors, the artists Togo Seiji and Fujita Tsuguji.

In 1963, Kim became the first Korean artist to participate in the 7th Sao Paolo Biennale. He and his wife moved to New York City that same year. From 1964 to 1970, his work evolved from textured canvases to paintings featuring flat, dense, swathes of color filled with figurative elements made up of lines and dots, reminiscent of the Korean countryside. Letters to his family and journal entries from this period reveal his feelings of being overwhelmed by New York and working in his small studio apartment. 7-VI-69 #65 (1969) reflects the artist’s deep respect for nature and his strong belief that the natural world was his true home. In 1963 he wrote: “I can’t work very well today because it’s overcast. It was snowing, but now it’s raining, which makes me feel terribly homesick for Korea. I can’t seem to separate my art from Seoul. I don’t like a single work I’ve done so far. I like the work I’ll be painting from now on. Simple composition, the subtle color of blue-only I can create my world. It’s getting darker outside.” Despite feelings of homesickness, Kim produced many brightly hued canvases during this time. Throughout his practice, blue remained a favored color due to its ability to convey tranquility, the sky, ocean, and the vastness of nature.

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

Journal

View All