ST. MORITZ.- Robilant+Voena now opening an exhibition of works by the Korean artist Minjung Kim, taking place at the Forum Paracelsus, St. Moritz. This is the artist’s second solo show with R+V, following a successful exhibition in 2019, also in St. Moritz.
Set in the serene and newly restored galleries of the Forum Paracelsus, the historic site of the mineral-rich springs that has made St. Moritz a destination for travellers across the centuries, the forthcoming exhibition offers visitors a journey through Kim’s key works from the last ten years. With examples of her most celebrated series, including Mountain and Street, the paintings in the exhibition have been carefully selected by the artist to reflect and complement the immense beauty of the surrounding Engadin region.
As the artist explains: “I hope that my artworks resonate harmoniously with the serenity, purity, and clarity of nature. Nature brings immense pleasure to the human body in St. Moritz, and I have endeavored to capture and reflect this instant connection with the vastness of the surroundings.”
Exploring the interconnectedness of Eastern and Western art practices, Kim’s ink paintings often incorporate elements of cutting, burning and gluing the paper. These creative acts imbue her works with spatial and temporal dimensions, infusing her works with a dual sense of continuity and gradual change, themes that are particularly pertinent to the Swiss mountain environment where the exhibition is located.
Her early artistic education in her native Korea honed her understanding and mastery of traditional techniques such as calligraphy and brush painting; in her early adulthood, her curiosity led her to study Western art while living in Italy, developing a particular fascination with European and American abstract painters of the twentieth century, including Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Paul Klee and Franz Kline. In her contemporary practice, Kim synthesises elements of the Eastern and Western traditions, giving life to ink paintings that seem to pulsate with a delicate balance of formal and process-based qualities.
Several of the paintings in the exhibition reflect and refract the beauty that may be experienced elsewhere in the natural environment of St. Moritz; three examples from her Mountain series evoke the peaceful infinity of these giants, Kim’s delicate and instinctive layering of successive washes of ink building a compelling rhythm. The artist’s meticulous process of burning and layering mulberry Hanji paper is encapsulated in the twisting, flowing form of The Water (2021) and Timeless (2019), the latter composed of slender strips of the paper from a Mountain artwork, burnt then layered, always preserving the initial gradient of its previous form; while the bold contrasts of Petal (2017) suggest the balance of the absolute and the ephemeral. Three contrasting paintings from The Street series show the artist’s constantly evolving investigations into the balance of process and formal qualities, informed by her cross-cultural experiences.
Coinciding with R+V’s exhibition of female Old Master artists in New York, entitled Ahead of her Time, this exhibition of works by Minjung Kim reflects the gallery’s ongoing ambition to give prominence to accomplished female artists, both historic and contemporary. Uniting key examples of Kim’s extraordinary method of blending not only Eastern and Western techniques, but their philosophies, the exhibition offers a moment of calm, and sublime appreciation of the ceaseless rhythm and interconnectedness of things.
Minjung Kim (b. 1962) was born in Gwangju, Republic of Korea. From an early age, Kim was encouraged by her family to pursue her artistic inclination, studying under various teachers including the famed watercolorist Yeongyun Kang. Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-nine, she also studied Oriental calligraphy. In 1980, she enrolled at Hongik University in Seoul, and in 1985 completed a Masters at the same university, with a thesis on the four basic materials in ink painting (mulberry Hanji paper, brush, ink pigment and the pigment grinding stone).
Kim moved to Milan in the late 1980s, curious to learn more about the Western artistic tradition, and graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Art in 1991. After graduating, the artist lived and worked in Italy for over 35 years, showing her works internationally, including in Italy, Switzerland, China, England, USA, and Israel. Particularly noteworthy was the recognition Kim gained through with the exhibition The Light, The Shade, The Depth held in Palazzo Caboto during the Venice Biennale in 2015.
She has exhibited at prominent worldwide museums and galleries, such as Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey, USA (2020); Hill Art Foundation, New York, USA (2020); Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2019); Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju, Korea (2018); Musée des Arts Asiatiques, Nice, France (2017); Hermès Foundation, Singapore (2017); OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2015); Palazzo Caboto, Venice, Italy (2015); Oko, New York, USA (2014); Studio d'Arte Raffaelli, Trento, Italy (2014); MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma), Rome, Italy (2012); the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK (2008); Guanshanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China (2007); Fondazione Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin, Italy (2006); and Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna Ascona, Ascona, Switzerland (2003). She also participated in the Gwangju Biennale (2004, 2018, 2023).
Her work is represented in numerous international public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; British Museum, London, UK; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Fundación Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, Sapin; Swiss Re Art Collection, Zürich, Switzerland; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York, USA; Asia Society Museum, New York, USA; Fondazione Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin, Italy; OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; and UniCredit Art Collection, Milan, Italy.
Kim currently lives and works between France and the United States.
Robilant+Voena
Minjung Kim
December 19th, 2023 - January 28th, 2024
