Perrotin Announces Representation of Young-Il Ahn's Estate

Young-Il Ahn 1934-2020, South Korea Follow +

Perrotin has announced its global representation of the estate of Korean American painter Young-Il Ahn (1934–2020).

Founder Emmanuel Perrotin expressed enthusiasm about the partnership, noting the gallery’s 2024 expansion to Los Angeles as a significant factor in deepening its engagement with artists connected to the city. The gallery, which operates across Europe, Asia, and the United States, will present a major survey of Ahn’s work in Los Angeles this April.

Curated by Perrotin senior director and art historian Jennifer King, Young-Il Ahn: Selected Works 1986–2019 (11 April–24 May 2025) will bring together key works from the final three decades of the artist’s career, including paintings from his celebrated ‘Water’ series. King has pointed to Perrotin’s sustained programme of Korean and Korean diaspora artists, situating Ahn’s practice within this broader curatorial focus.

Born in Gaeseong, now in North Korea, Ahn showed early promise, winning national art competitions before graduating from Seoul National University in 1958. Following military service, he immigrated to the United States in 1966, settling in Los Angeles, where he lived and worked for more than five decades.

Ahn gained wider critical recognition later in life for his luminous abstractions, which register the shifting light and surface of the Pacific Ocean. In 2017, he became the first Korean American artist to present a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The exhibition at Perrotin will include works from Ahn’s ‘California’ series, in which gestural abstraction evokes the atmospheric conditions of the state, as well as paintings from his ‘Harbor’ and ‘Self-Reflection’ series—the latter drawing on Korean calligraphy and mask imagery.

Ahn’s work has often been discussed in relation to Dansaekhwa, the postwar Korean movement associated with artists such as Park Seo-Bo and Lee Ufan, particularly in its emphasis on repetition, materiality, and meditative process. —[O]

Main image: Young-Il Ahn in his studio, c. 1970s. Courtesy Young-Il Ahn Estate.