LONDON.- Sotheby’s S│2 London is presenting a solo exhibition on British-Singaporean sculptor Kim Lim.
The exhibition takes place in both Gallery One and Gallery Two and is the first time S│2 London dedicates its whole space to a single artist. In collaboration with the artist’s estate, the gallery published an accompanying monograph on Kim Lim’s life and work, which will be celebrated with a book launch and panel discussion during Frieze Week. The monograph contains unseen archival material, a comprehensive discussion of her sculptural practice and printmaking, republished texts and new commissions. In conversation with the current exhibition, Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition, at Manchester Art Gallery which features Lim’s work, the new monograph will also include a new commissioned essay by curator Hammad Nasar.
Born in Singapore, Kim Lim travelled to London in the mid-1950s to pursue a career as an artist, enrolling in St Martin’s and Slade School. Fascinated by the work of Brancusi and Hellenistic sculptures and temples she had seen on her travels as a student, Lim began creating expressive reliefs in prints and carved stone which gave visual form to her an interest in the unity and harmony in the cosmos.
“I found that I always responded to things that were done in earlier civilisations that seemed to have less elaboration and more strength.” (1996)
In the 1960s, Kim Lim turned to wood and metal to serve as the material means for her exploration of the divergent range of subjects which interested her: Greco-Roman mythological characters, cultural figures and geographical sites she had visited. Even Lim’s earliest works, such as Abacus (1959), illustrate the artist’s obsession with defining the border between the seen and unseen, between the reality of physical objects and the sensation of a world beyond them.
The archaic forms of Lim’s practice in the sixties changed direction in the next decade, as Lim’s ideological interests proceeded towards the cycle of time itself. Lim chose minimal, repetitive reliefs and cut-outs, imprinted by way of wood and stone in rectangular wooden ladder-shapes. Though abstract in their extreme simplicity, these objects invite an endless conversation with the viewer: one in which time is refracted through the clean linearity of these wooden constructions.
“You return to the same theme but with a different insight. It’s a bit like staying in a place for a period – you think you know it well but when you go back again, you realise how much you’ve missed.” (1982)
S│2 reflects on Lim’s body of work by connecting the artist’s earliest forms to their evolution throughout the 1980s and 1990s, drawing attention to Lim’s uniquely privileged position in the history of British contemporary sculpture. Notably, her work was exhibited at the First Hayward Annual in 1977, in which she was the only woman and non-white artist shown. The following year, Lim served as one of the five women on the Hayward Annual’s all-female selection committee in 1978, alongside Tess Jaray, Liliane Lijn, Gillian Wise Ciobaratu and Rita Donagh.
Despite Lim’s importance as a symbol of female talent in the machismo world of carving, Kim Lim’s work remains apart from mere movement and narrative. Her sculptures bind themselves to the quiet warmth of wood and stone, as if the rhythms of the natural world have been distilled into static works of art. Her work transcends ideology and political statements, expressing metaphysical truths which demonstrate the continuity between the contemporary and the ancient.
Kim Lim’s work is held in many international public collections including the Tate Britain, London; The Singapore National Gallery; the Arts Council in London and the Fukuyama City Museum in Japan. Major exhibitions of her work include the 1979 retrospective at the Roundhouse Gallery, London and the 1999 posthumous retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre. Recent exhibitions include Kim Lim: Sculpting Light at the STPI Gallery in Singapore and the current Speech Acts exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery.
