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DiggThe UN Building, Irwin's Disc and Other Paintings
March 20, 2008- May 3, 2008
Reception: March 20, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Byron Kim
Max Protetch
511 W 22nd StThe tale is told of how Delacroix, seeking to give emphasis to a yellow drapery, decided to go to the Louvre to see how Rubens would manage it. The cabs in Paris were at that time painted canary yellow, and Delacroix noticed that the cab standing in wait for him cast a violet shadow in the sunlight. This was the knowledge he sought; he paid the cabman and returned to work.
--Philip Ball, Bright Earth. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001
Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Byron Kim. The works in Irwin's Disc, The U.N. Building, and Other Paintings take several emblematic visual phenomena as their subjects, among them Robert Irwin's canonical untitled disc sculptures of the late 1960s and perspective views of the U.N. Building.
The impetus for the exhibition came as Kim was driving uptown on Manhattan's FDR Drive. He saw the U.N. Headquarters out of the corner of his eye, on the oblique, as a series of three vertical stripes. Simplified in this way, the building, a modern icon, took on the appearance of a prototypical modernist painting. In the paintings based on this subject, the building appears slightly dingy, as if it has lost its hard edges, suggesting perhaps a sense of loss or belatedness, a realization that the building and the values for which it stands now resonate with failure as much as hope.
Kim came across a reproduction of a Robert Irwin disc sculpture in Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing. The reproduction was not a very good one, and yet it became the source for the paintings. The image in the book, perhaps in some way like the discs themselves, has become a faded reminder of an attempt for transcendence--an idea of the future as seen from the past. In the painting, the shadows seem to have taken over the disc, lending both works, sculpture and painting, source and reproduction, a melancholy cast, a mute beauty, a sense of communication thwarted.
Separate but related to these two lines of inquiry, Kim, again working from unreliable reproductions, studied the way light was painted in a 1963 work by Edward Hopper, Sun In An Empty Room and created a painting of vertical stripes.
Since the beginning of his career in the early 1990s, Byron Kim has received acclaim for his critical examination of the link between abstraction and sublimity, and his experimental approach to such issues as skin color, family, landscape, and art history. A mid-career retrospective, Threshold, curated by Eugenie Tsai and organized by Constance Lewallen and the Berkeley Art Museum, traveled to six venues in the United States and Korea from 2004 to 2007 (catalogue available). He currently has a painting in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today at the Museum of Modern Art.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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