BEACON, NY.- Dia Art Foundation opened a major exhibition of work by Lee Ufan at Dia Beacon, New York. It presents an extraordinary selection of paintings the artist realized between the 1970s and early ’90s, alongside three of his Mono-ha sculptures that extend the conceptual propositions of his works on canvas. The specificity of Lee’s work emerges beside that of his international peers, on view in nearby galleries, such as On Kawara, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, and Kishio Suga, all equally invested in questions of material, time, and metaphysics.
Taking place concurrently with a major exhibition of Lee’s work at SMAC San Marco Art Centre in Venice, organized by Dia and curated by the institution’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director Jessica Morgan, these two presentations celebrate the artist’s 90th birthday and his extraordinary contribution across disciplines and geographies.
“This exhibition is particularly special as we celebrate a landmark year for Lee Ufan and reflect on the lasting importance and influence of his work. Lee’s remarkable gift of eight paintings to Dia last year has allowed us to shine a light on his multidisciplinary practice. I am looking forward to our audiences encountering these works in the context of Dia Beacon, highlighting the parallel formal and conceptual concerns being tackled contemporaneously and internationally,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.
Lee is a founding member of Mono-ha (School of Things), a loosely defined group of artists who worked in a shared sculptural idiom in Japan roughly between 1969 and ’74. In work from that time, rather than asserting or denying authorship over an object, Lee distributed forms across what he called a “system” of material and physical relations that inherently incorporate the viewer.
The system-based paintings at the center of the exhibition illustrate the artist’s exploration of the canvas as a space populated by both presence and absence. His From Point and From Line series (both 1973–84) rigorously and poetically chart infinity through repeated brushstrokes and depletion of the paint they carry. This emphasis on balance, expectation, and emptiness is also demonstrated in Lee’s two Relatum sculptures (1974/2011 and 1974/2019) that stage materials in states of contact and suspension.
In his later painting series With Winds (1987–91), Lee shifted toward wavering gestures and a compositional balancing of form and void, activating the pictorial surface as a visible structure of invisible movement. Displayed in proximity, a third Relatum (formerly System) (1969) sculpture doubles and stretches the corners of the architecture that contains it, suggesting movement in stability.
Merging phenomenology, Structuralism, and Eastern metaphysics, the works on view articulate Lee’s sustained critique of modernity through paintings and sculptures produced over three decades of his practice.
“Characterized by systematic brushstrokes and a cyclical process of material exhaustion, Lee’s paintings weigh presence and absence as a philosophical endeavor, while the dense mineral pigments they are made of glimmer in the natural-light conditions of Dia Beacon,” said Matilde Guidelli Guidi, curator and co–department head. “Pairing these with a selection of his sculptures, the exhibition demonstrates the key registers of Lee’s exemplary practice, from the playful and the suspenseful to the meditative and the reflective.”
Lee Ufan is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head, with Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.
Lee Ufan was born in Gyeongsangnam-do, Korea, in 1936, while the country was under Japanese occupation. In 1956, following training in traditional ink-brush techniques at Seoul National University High School, he moved to Tokyo, where he studied philosophy at Nihon University. In 1967, he had his first solo show at Sato Gallery, Tokyo, and, in 1968, his work was included in Contemporary Korean Painting at Tokyo Museum of Modern Art. In 1969, Lee staged an ephemeral happening and made contingent structures for the 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, which signaled a departure from his earlier optical, discrete paintings. This show brought together Japanese artists identified with Mono-ha (School of Things). Throughout the 1970s, the artist participated in several exhibitions that juxtaposed North American, East Asian, and European artists to highlight their shared concern with material, process, and site. A dedicated teacher and prolific cultural critic, Lee has published 17 books. In recent years, acclaim for his work has brought him exhibitions worldwide. In 2010, the Lee Ufan Museum, designed by Tadao Ando, opened in Naoshima, Japan. Increasingly distilled and monumental, the artist’s sculptures continue to combine natural and industrial materials, in keeping with his relational philosophy. Lee lives in Kamakura, Japan, and Paris.
