Lee Bul's Organic and Inorganic Forms at Thaddaeus Ropac

Ribbons of colour weave across densely worked fields in Lee Bul‘s newest paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac’s London gallery.

Mother-of-pearl, an iridescent material Bul likes because it ‘is related to organisms that come from the inside out’, coalesces with acrylic paint in lines that spread across the canvas like veins.

Playing with paradoxes, both in context and material, Bul’s ‘Perdu’ series, first shown in 2019, takes its name from the French for ‘lost’ and critiques the notion of utopia.

‘For me, utopia in its paradoxical essence is a nostalgic, even elegiac, idea,’ Bul explains.

In their introduction to the exhibition, Thaddaeus Ropac notes an archaic use of the term perdu to describe ‘a sentinel assigned to a particularly remote and dangerous location’. It is suggestive, in this instance, of the guards who watch over the demilitarised zone that separates North and South Korea.

Lee Bul (30 March–13 May 2023) is the South Korean artist’s first solo show in the U.K. since her major retrospective Crashing at the Hayward Gallery in 2018.

Bul’s exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac coincides with the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Nordic countries, Lee Bul (11 March–27 August 2023) at Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden.

Main image: Lee Bul, Perdu CLXIII (2023) (detail). Mother of pearl, acrylic paint on wooden base panel, stainless steel frame. 163 x 113 x 6.5 cm. © Lee Bul. Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg/Seoul. Photo: Jeon Byung-cheol.