LEE UFAN & MARK ROTHKO

On view from September 4 to October 26 and coinciding with Frieze Seoul, the show will span two floors of the gallery, bringing a suite of paintings from Lee’s Dialogue and Response series, made between 2018 and 2023, into conversation with major works by Mark Rothko from the 1950s and 1960s.

Born in 1936, Lee Ufan was a leading figure of the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha in the late 1960s. His artistic practice, which emphasises the relationships between space, perception, and object, developed from his deep appreciation for nature and materiality. Rothko, a pioneer of the New York School, is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, known for his Colour-field paintings of immense scale that are imbued with psychological and spiritual import. While each artist’s work will be given a dedicated space and presented separately in the upcoming show in Seoul, the exhibition will draw out the many resonances and intersections—in terms of colour, surface, and atmosphere—that cut across both artists’ work.

The paintings of Rothko have long been celebrated for their ability to summon the sublime powers of colour, dissolving fields of pigment into expanses of radiant atmosphere. Colour is equally potent in Lee’s paintings, though it often emerges as a frozen gesture, in contrast to Rothko’s gesture-less surfaces. If Rothko’s indecipherable application of paint evokes the scumbles and fogs of late Titian—flooding the entire canvas and erasing any sense of line or hard contour—Lee’s forms are comparatively crisp and self-contained. Yet both artists use colour as a locus for eliciting a deeply contemplative state in the viewer, and both deal with the aesthetics of air, emptiness, and vapour in their work, investigating painting’s capacity to intensify our experience of colour and to produce an effect that is at once awesome and meditative, conveying both power and quiescence.

For these two artists, painting becomes a tool for crystallising the ephemeral into the concrete. Lee’s works capture the fleeting energy of a brushstroke and concretise it into the immediacy of colour, making it feel as solid as stone. In a similar way, Rothko congeals atmosphere into the fixed stability of form.

In Lee’s work, the brushstroke is intimately tied to the artist’s breath—this vapour, this ‘atmos’ of the lungs, which settles onto the canvas and takes the form of a picture. Rothko’s paintings often have the sense of nebulous clouds—as if air masses were taking shape, brooding within an expanse of darkening sky. Situating the artists in dialogue, the presentation in Seoul explores how their works embody these poetics of vapour and air. Seen together, they speak to the climatic possibilities of abstraction, in which paintings produce their own weather, transforming and reshaping our experience of space and our very presence within it.

In addition to his paintings, the exhibition will also include a new sculpture by Lee, Relatum – Correspondence (2024), installed in the gallery’s courtyard. Featuring a heavy stone dropped on a steel plate, this work examines the relationships between individual elements as defined by both space and objecthood.