SEOUL.- Perrotin announced the opening of a second exhibition space in Seoul. Located in the district of Gangnam, Perrotin Dosan Park will open on August 27th, 2022 with an exhibition by Emma Webster, marking the British-American artist’s debut with Perrotin.

Situated in the heart of Seoul’s luxury shopping district between Dosan Park and Horim Art Center, Perrotin Dosan Park is in the vicinity of the flagships of major global brands such as Maison Hermès Dosan Park across the street and Maison Louis Vuitton Seoul, and two major Korean auction houses.

The building, comprising two floors and offering exhibition space of about 190 square meters (2,060 square feet), is designed by KIAS (Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio) in collaboration with Yoki Design and Kenny Ho.

One of the first international galleries to establish an exhibition space in Seoul, Perrotin launched an outpost in 2016 in the historic cultural neighborhood of Samcheong-dong. The gallery’s expansion in South Korea’s capital aims to strategically broaden its roster and strengthen its connections to art communities by augmenting its programming in complementary exhibition locations in both of Seoul’s northern and southern centers. Perrotin Dosan Park is the gallery’s eleventh location across seven cities: Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Dubai.

The inauguration of Perrotin Dosan Park will coincide with the first edition of Frieze Seoul (September 2–5) and the 21st edition of Kiaf Seoul (September 2–6). Perrotin’s booth in Frieze is dedicated to a solo presentation by New York-based artist Tavares Strachan marking his debut in Asia, and its booth in Kiaf will showcase new works by various artists of the gallery’s program.

At Perrotin Samcheong-dong in the original space, Bay Area artist Barry McGee’s first solo show in South Korea will be on show from August 5th through September 8th, 2022.

The inaugural exhibition of Perrotin Dosan Park will be a solo show of Emma Webster (b. 1989, Encinitas, California, USA), who lives and works in Los Angeles. Illuminarium, conceived specially for Dosan Park, marks Webster’s debut with Perrotin and in Asia. The artist joins the gallery after recent solo exhibitions at Carl Kostyál (London), Alexander Berggruen (New York) and Stems Gallery (Brussels) in 2021.

Emma Webster’s landscape paintings teleport viewers into the otherworldly. The places she depicts, convincing and hallucinatory, merge spatial expectations with mystifying fantasy. The paintings come from a hybrid sketching-sculpting process within screen-space. Webster first constructs scenes in virtual reality, which she then embellishes with theatrical illumination, to create natural vistas that relish in artifice, drama, and distortion. Of her VR models, Webster says: “Working from within the still-life is more akin to how we go about the world. There can be no ‘outside.’”

Illuminarium plays with our notions of the virtual. Webster’s fluid transcription of 2D into 3D, and vice versa onto canvas, insinuates a new iteration of collage. This kneading technique between media, of fleshing out then flattening, clarifying then obfuscating, refines the unreal worlds. The New Yorker has praised her “imaginative approach to the centuries-old genre of landscape,” and her forays inhabit a curious tension as it tempers cutting-edge technology with a time-honed tradition of painting.