American artist Byron Kim is recognised for his conceptual paintings that address the complex and multifaceted constituents of contemporary human experience.
Read MoreByron Kim first received critical attention for his painting series 'Synecdoche' (1999—2001) when it appeared in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Each panel is painted in a single hue in the ranges of beige, brown and pink, based on an individual's skin colour—friends and family, strangers, fellow artists—that Kim studied carefully before mixing the pigments. Of uniform size, the panels can be arranged into grids; at Whitney, the artist presented an impressive group of 400.
Against the backdrop of the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial, criticised for its simplification of identity politics, Kim's work could be read as repeating the adage that humans come in all shades. Lost in this critique, however, would be the artist's efforts to complicate the modernist tradition of abstraction, reintroducing the social and political dimensions of human existence to the supposedly pure grid.
The 'Synecdoche' paintings are now in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Since 2001, Kim has painted the sky (almost) every Sunday, naming the resulting works 'Sunday Paintings'. The series usually depict the blue sky, some clear, with others capturing snippets of the clouds, on a square canvas. Kim writes a short journalistic entry on each work after completion, preserving passing moments of both his personal life and the universal sky.
At first glance, Kim's 'Bruise' paintings are abstract works in their depictions of soft, amorphous pools of colours, in which clouds of blue or deep red spread over beige- or brown-toned backgrounds. They are, however, renditions of bruises on skin, made by staining the canvas with natural pigment and dye.
While it is easier to read implications of violence into the paintings, Kim has said that they were inspired by American writer and poet Carl Phillips' poem Alba: Innocence, an affectionate study of a bruise on a lover's sleeping body.
The 'B.Q.O.' series began in January 2020, when the artist was living on Captiva Island, Florida, on a Rauschenberg Residency. The title is an abbreviation of Berton, Queequeg, and Odysseus, the characters from Solaris, Moby Dick, and The Odyssey, all three of which feature the ocean as the main backdrop.
Each 'B.Q.O.' painting comprises three panels, stacked vertically, that depict, from top to bottom: the sky, water/ocean and underwater. Some are still, almost flat planes of colours, while others are more representational with the white foam of the waves. The horizon nevertheless remains calm throughout the paintings, imparting a sense of immersion.
Byron Kim has shown his work internationally. The artist's first solo museum exhibition, titled Threshold, was presented by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 2004, after which it travelled to five other locations in the United States and to Leeum, Samsung Museum of Modern Art, in Seoul, South Korea.
Solo exhibitions include: Marine Layer, Kukje Gallery, Busan (2023); Byron Kim: Drawn to Water, James Cohan Gallery, New York (2022); Byron Kim: The Sunday Paintings, MoCA Cleveland (2019); Pond Lily Over Mushroom Cloud: Byron Kim Adapts the Black on Black Cosmology of Maria Martinez, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2015).
Group exhibitions include: Come a Little Closer, DC Moore Gallery, New York (2023); Monochrome Multitudes, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (2022); One Shiny Day, Daegu Art Museum (2019); The 12th Gwangju Biennale: Imagined Borders, Gwangju (2018); Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016).
Article on the artist can be found in Hyperallergic, on Art News, and in the New Yorker.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2023
