Korea International Art Fair

Past
Sep 19 – Oct 17, 2020
Online

Our presentation for KIAF will feature a range of works by significant artists including Peter Alexander, Nigel Cooke, Mary Corse, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Tim Eitel, Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Liu Jianhua, Alicja Kwade, Lee Ufan, Lee Kun-Yong, Kohei Nawa, Joel Shapiro, and teamLab.

Details

Korea International Art Fair (KIAF)
Sep 19 – Oct 18, 2020

Above: Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 2019, watercolor on washi, 74" × 39" (188 cm × 99.1 cm) © Sam Gilliam

Online Access

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In-Person Viewing

Sep 22 – 27, 2020
Pace Gallery Seoul
262 Itaewon-ro
Yongsan-gu, Seoul
+82-2-790-9388
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Peter Alexander

Fabricated from semi-translucent urethane, 11/13/19 Ice Grey Block (2019) is a continuation of Peter Alexander’s career-long love affair with the material. The three-dimensional trapezoid with its hues of grey is a modest totem of West Coast Minimalism, and is an investigation of materiality and abstraction. Its geometric form and the artist’s judicious use of color alter a viewer’s way of seeing, working in tandem to absorb and refract the light that strike the sculpture’s surface. With this piece, Alexander demonstrates his prowess as a masterful illusionist. While the amalgam of color transcends the prism in which it is suspended, the artist manages to capture the ephemeral beauty of light and space within a urethane cast.

Born and raised in Southern California, Peter Alexander made a name for himself in the Light and Space movement in the 1960s. His translucent boxes of different shapes, sizes, and colors comprised of resin and polyurethane became his signature.

Go With The Flow by Peter Alexander — Peter Alexander, *Go With The Flow*, 2020, urethane, 77" × 64" × 2" (195.6 cm × 162.6 cm × 5.1 cm), 10 units, overall installed

From the very start of his career in the early 1960s, Peter Alexander employed an opulent color palette for his resin and urethane works. As a pioneer of the Light and Space movement, Alexander is widely regarded by his contemporaries for his fearless experimentation and ability as a colorist, exemplified by Go With The Flow (2020), among the artist’s final sculptures.

The sculpture, consisting of ten long, rounded, polychromatic stripes, pulsates out from the wall space it occupies. It is as much an ode to Los Angeles, the city where his life began and ended, as a summation of the artist’s body of work. The title of the work alone, Go With The Flow, describes the light-hearted sentiment said and practiced by Southern Californians.

An important component of Alexander’s practice was the organizational hierarchy of light, color, shadow, and reflection. The asymmetry of the grouped bands challenge perceptions as they reverberate against one another and the wall on which they are hung. The vibrant strobes dissolve the perceived border between object and environment and in turn engage viewers to question their own spatial awareness.

Nigel Cooke

Nigel Cooke’s Echo (2020), completed on the heels of his New Paintings exhibition at Pace in New York, represents the artist’s recent shift toward a more performative, energetic, and abstract approach to figuration, displaying a new desire to establish a dialogue between abstraction and figuration.

Though the work initially appears monochromatic, chasms between the sweeping lacerations of line on the canvas are interlaced with faint yellows and blacks. As demonstrated in this piece, Cooke has not taken a complete hiatus from representational art, but has instead shifted toward a representation of the internal.

Nigel Cooke’s first solo exhibition in Seoul will take place concurrent to KIAF from September 2 – October 24 at Itaewon-ro 262, Youngsan-gu. The show will feature four new paintings and a selection of works on paper that further the artist’s discourse on abstracted figurations.

Mary Corse

Untitled (White Narrow Inner Band with White Sides, Beveled) (2020), is a recent work by American artist Mary Corse, whose practice investigates light and perception. The narrow canvas of the painting is delineated by hard-edged lines, producing radiant iridescent projections that jettison a one-point perspective. Corse’s labor-intensive brushstrokes demonstrate her methodical application of vertical lines, allowing her to achieve her goal to not merely create light through painting, but rather painting through light. “Art is not on the wall, it’s in your perception,” the artist has previously stated.

In 1968, Mary Corse pioneered a new approach to painting by blending glass microspheres into acrylic. The unique practice gave Corse the ability to paint refractive fields of color directly onto her canvases, while also distinguishing her from contemporaries associated with the Light and Space movement.

Untitled by Mary Corse — Mary Corse, *Untitled*, 2017, Acrylic squares and microspheres in acrylic on canvas, 127 cm × 83.8 cm (50" × 33")

Untitled (Electric Light) by Mary Corse — Mary Corse, *Untitled (Electric Light)*, 2019, argon, plexiglass, high-frequency generator, light tubes, monofilament, 56-7/8" × 57-1/8" × 6" (144.5 cm × 145.1 cm × 15.2 cm)

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Tim Eitel

Drawn from the everyday and bordering on the mundane, Tim Eitel’s works capture scenes of life and examine moments in time and space that often go overlooked. Renowned for his psychological portraits of contemporary society and his depictions of the urban landscape as exemplified in Interior (Passage) (2020), Eitel constructs familiar environments that at first glance appear to exist within a shared human reality. Reading as a memory suspended in time and space, Interior (Passage) conveys universally understood recollections of isolation and quietude.

From November 17 – December 23, 2020, Pace will present the first solo exhibition of Tim Eitel’s work in Seoul. Staged at Itaewon-ro 262, Youngsangu, Eitel’s upcoming show will explore the artist’s central theme of solitude in contemporary settings. This presentation opens just one month after the German artist’s installation closes at the Daegu Art Museum, on view through October 18, 2020—his largest institutional solo exhibition to date.

Dan Flavin

Untitled (1972) is a multicolored work that exemplifies Dan Flavin’s use of radiant, readymade tubing. The artist deploys two fluorescent lights, one red and one blue, which intersect in the middle of a sculptural plane. Flavin sorts the two light rods in direct opposition toward one another at this central coordinate. Though not wholly visible, the inverted fluorescent illuminates the space behind the sculpture, casting shadows that establish dimensionality and articulate the work’s depth. Like a painter with his palette in hand, Flavin’s amalgamation of the two primary-colored fluorescents produces vibrant hues of ultraviolet and indigo that extend far beyond the sculpture’s boundaries.

American artist Dan Flavin—a trailblazer of the Minimalism movement—is known for his installations featuring fluorescent lighting tubes assembled in an array of geometric, ambient arrangements. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, the artist set out on a creative expedition developing a sophisticated lineup of works that display the artist’s thoughtful observations of space and geometry. Utilizing factory-made fluorescent lights of varying lengths, colors, and wattage, Flavin took full command of the environments that his light works furnished.

Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam’s Untitled (2019) recalls the improvisational ethos of jazz music that has inspired the artist’s abstractions from the very beginning of his career. The diptych synthesizes a range of varied colors, accompanied by varied tones of black paint that mix on the surface of the paper, in a composition that mirrors each other. The folded, wrapped, and knotted forms present in the work brings attention to the sculptural characteristics of their materials, while maintaining their status as paintings. As exemplified in Untitled (2019), the artist’s process-based approach to creating vibrant abstractions involves a careful mix of vivid watercolors along the folds and creases of Japanese washi paper.

Often associated with the Washington Color School, Sam Gilliam is recognized for revolutionizing Color Field painting in the late 1960s. Beginning in 1962, the artist loosened his formal approach and over the course of the decade began creating works with thinned acrylic paint. By the late 1960s, Gilliam began to open up his process beyond the traditional format of painting by manipulating the canvas, stretchers, paint, and presentation methods. Add here that he was first African American artist to represent the US in Venice Biennale.

In November, Pace will present a solo exhibition of new work by Gilliam, on view from November 5 through December 23 at the gallery’s global headquarters in New York. This comes in advance of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s major retrospective of the artist’s work in spring 2022, which spans over six decades of work and marks the first American museum retrospective of the artist in more than 15 years.

David Hockney

Robert Irwin

Liu Jianhua

Created between 2015 – 2019, Liu Jianhua’s Lines No. 17 (2015-2019), Lines No. 18 (2015-2019), and Lines No. 19 (2015-2019) are exemplars of the artist’s mastery as both a potter and sculptor. These three installations—centering on the transience of time and place, a theme that defines Jianhua’s oeuvre—create a triad of porcelain works that meditate on subjects of impermanence while simultaneously relying on a Chinese craft that has withstood the test of time. The ribbons of each sculpture snake around and gracefully collide at various loops and turns, reading as calligraphic, free-handed forms, which express the artist’s devotion to the study of line and cyclical rhythm.

The artist began his career in 1977 as an apprentice at the Jingdezhen Pottery and Porcelain Sculpture Factory, the oldest established center of ceramic production in China. Jianhua fully embarked on his artistic journey after years of honing his skills at the factory and in the Fine Arts Department of the Jingdezhen Pottery and Porcelain College. Throughout his career, the artist has pulled inspiration from Chinese history and cultural heritage.

Lines No. 19 by Liu Jianhua — Liu Jianhua, *Lines No. 19*, 2015-2019, porcelain, 96 cm × 87 cm × 2 cm (37-13/16" × 34-1/4" × 13/16")

Lines No. 17 by Liu Jianhua — Liu Jianhua, *Lines No. 17*, 2015-2019, porcelain, 84 cm × 114 cm × 2 cm (33-1/16" × 44-7/8" × 13/16")

Alicja Kwade

Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade’s TransForm (2020), rendered in original tree segments, patinated bronze, oak, malachite, ceramic, granite, and new silver, showcases Kwade’s spirited scientific inquiries to better comprehend the world around her. The constellation of objects that Kwade has brought together evoke a dwarfed solar system, calling attention to pieces of organic matter and natural resources while exploring the omnipresent relationship between time and space. In this way, Kwade’s work functions as a materialized articulation of her determination to interpret the unanswerable questions of the cosmos.

In a constant pursuit to challenge the structures of reality and society, Alicja Kwade has spent her career investigating the perception of time. Often working with site-specific installations, she transforms environs into immersive laboratories where viewers are encouraged to question their understanding of the universe that surrounds them. The artist’s curiosity and skepticism inspire her translation of themes related to philosophy and natural science.

In the coming months, Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany, will present Kausalkonsequenz, a solo exhibition of the Kwade's work. In 2021, Kwade will present In Abwesenheit, a solo project at Berlinische Galerie–Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin, Germany.

Lee Ufan

Lee Kun-Yong

Kohei Nawa

PixCell-Ram Skull by Kohei Nawa — Kohei Nawa, *PixCell-Ram Skull*, 2020, mixed media, 30.2 cm × 50.5 cm × 15.9 cm (11-7/8" × 19-7/8" × 6-1/4")

Direction #334 by Kohei Nawa — Kohei Nawa, *Direction #334*, 2020, paint on canvas, 125 cm × 125 cm (49-3/16" × 49-3/16")

Joel Shapiro

Joel Shapiro’s sculptures subvert the distinctions between abstraction and representation. The artist’s abstracted figurations have charted new territories with their novel consideration of motion through the arrangement of simplified elements. In untitled (2016-2017), Shapiro strips down the detailed intricacies of studied forms, demonstrating the artist’s self-prescribed school of thought. Breaking down the elaborateness of sculpture to distill its raw anatomy, the artist reveals the rigid yet malleable structure of the human frame in this work.

Joel Shapiro has spent the past half-century producing a body of work ranging in material, scale, and form—all of which embrace the process and vocabulary of rectilinear shapes. His technical approach is a product of his direct involvement with the Postminimalism generation of the 1970s, and his practice has evolved since its beginnings in the instability of institutional critique and urban intervention, continuously negotiating the boundaries between introspection and open engagement with his surroundings.

teamLab

Both entertaining and thought-provoking, Flowers and People - Dark (2015) by interdisciplinary art collective teamLab operates on a computer-generated program that continuously recasts the work in real time as individual visual events never to be replicated or repeated. The work exhibits a digital field of budding flowers that sprout and grow as they quietly blossom across the paneled display, in a subtle nod to the Japanese and Chinese traditions of silkscreen painting which often depicted scenes of nature. As viewers approach the screen, the flowers begin to expand and contract, altering and adapting until the individual is wholly enveloped in the artists virtual garden, in an investigation in human behavior and connection in the age of information.

For nearly two decades, teamLab has exercised collaborative practices that bridge between art, technology, design, and the natural world. The Japan-based group—comprising artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects—has presented a wide array of digital artwork blending pre-modern Japanese iconography with interactive design on a global scale since 2001.

teamLab’s upcoming solo exhibition teamLab: LIFE will be presented September 18 – March 28, 2021 at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), Seoul.