Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Kim Yun Shin: In Focus, the first-ever solo exhibition of the artist’s work in New York City and the first with Lehmann Maupin. This exhibition precedes her participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, opening April 2024. In this In Focus presentation, Kim’s abstract wood sculptures and vibrant paintings explore the balance of physical and spiritual space. Over the course of Kim’s six-decades-long career, she engages process, repetition, and gestalt in a manner of lyrical abstraction, revealing expressions of the internal and external worlds we inhabit and create.
One of the first women to formally train as a sculptor in Korea, Kim is known for her physically challenging processes of cutting into wood with a chainsaw, intuitively assembling the pieces, and adorning her cut surfaces with expressive mark-making, creating works that resemble the natural world. Her sculptures are assemblages of terracotta-hued natural wood—algarrobo, indigenous to South America—stacked vertically and scarred with angular notches and planes. The resulting objects appear like sprouting plants or gestural figures, evoking both human and animal forms. Since the late 1970s, many have been titled Add Two Add One Divide Two Divide One. The leading words add and divide recall Kim’s process, as well as the geometric expression of Yin-Yang in Eastern philosophy: opposing tendencies that complement one another, coalescing in a kind of unity. These dynamic amalgamations trace the fusion of physical and spiritual spaces that distinctly reflect Kim’s life and work.
The same can be said of Kim’s paintings. Having traveled extensively throughout her life, Kim has been living between Korea and Argentina since 1984, and her materials, compositions, and colors reflect her unique diasporic experience. At the same time, her hybrid domains provide a universality that transcends time and place. Kim’s brightly colored paintings on wood sculptures and canvas embody perceptions of nature and humanity—landscapes of both the environment and of the inner soul. Soft forms and geometric lines embrace a network of energized and radiant marks; compositions fit together like a free-form patterned quilt, creating the kind of depth and dimension characteristic of looking through a densely layered forest. The disparate energies of flat color and voluminous pattern, curved lines and sharp angles, and warm and cool tones harmonize with one another, synthesizing Kim’s internal and external expressions of her environment in compositions akin to artist Wassily Kandinsky’s confluence of abstracted forms and spiritual resonance. Similar to her sculptural practice, Kim paints by process of addition and reduction, using a knife to apply and scrape off paint. These invented “scapes”—land, sea, sky—convey an embodiment of Kim’s emotional and spiritual connection to a place, rather than any formal geographic location, emphasized via the repeated title Song of My Soul.
Kim’s innovative methods and abstract vocabulary are in lively dialogue with artists represented at Lehmann Maupin. Her use of bold colors, complexly layered surfaces, repetitive mark making, and atmospheric tension resonate with works by McArthur Binion (b. 1946, Macon, MS; lives and works in Chicago, IL) and Shirazeh Houshiary (b. 1955, Shiraz, Iran; lives and works in London, UK). The gallery is privileged to work with these international artists, as well as other historically important Korean artists such as Do Ho Suh, Lee Bul, Sung Neung Kyung, and Suh Se Ok—relationships that date back to as early as 2000. As one of the first international galleries with an outpost in South Korea, Lehmann Maupin is deeply connected to Seoul and artists of the region. Kim’s multimedia practice is singular in her unique expression of varied environment, paving the way as a first-generation woman sculptor in Korea in the late’ 60s and ‘70s for future generations of women artists. As she said recently following the announcement of her co-representation at Lehmann Maupin and Kukje Gallery, “with my remaining strength, I will return everyone’s support by devoting my time to creating work that I hope will inspire many.”