[NewYork]Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus

■Exhibition Information

Title : Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus

Date : 20 February - 4 April 2020

Venue : TINA KIM GALLERY, 525 WEST 21ST STREET, NY 10011

Gallery Hours : Tuesday through Saturday 10 AM – 6 PM

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of Lee Seung Jio (1941-1990), on view from February 20 through April 4, 2020. The exhibition will focus on works from Lee’s 25-year-long painting career, throughout which he dedicated himself to confronting the canvas plane and conceptualizing the dynamic relationship among flatness, form, and materiality. The exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery will constitute Lee Seung Jio’s first solo exhibition in New York, showcasing 18 works that span the artist’s career from the 1960s up to his passing in 1990. This exhibition hopes to elevate Lee Seung Jio’s unique singular vision that helped define Korean modernism and contemporary art from mid-century to today.

Lee Seung Jio studied in the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University in Seoul before going on to found the Origin Group in 1963 alongside his contemporaries Suh Seung-Won and Choi Myoung-Young. Unlike the Dansaekhwa artists who were grouped together only decades later by curators, the Origin painters––slightly younger than the Dansaekhwa artists––exhibited together from the movement’s onset, rallying around a commitment to rebel against national disorder and tumult through cool, unemotional abstraction. The Origin painters embraced the traditionally Western media of oil painting, perfecting their own practices and imbuing their paintings with a stark sense of duality between volume and flatness. The stark lines and hard edges of these works emerged in response to the decidedly more heated and emotional Korean Art Informel movement as a means of exploring how painting could become a more authentically Korean medium. Repetition and refinement functioned as the common threads throughout the works by these painters.

Over the course of Lee’s career he continued to adapt the singular pipe pattern, breaking it down and molding it until the pipes ceased to be merely a pattern and instead became an integral element to the paintings themselves. Engendering what the artist himself would call “the illusion of materiality” through his painstaking, repetitive brushstrokes, these later works are no longer paintings of pipes on canvas, but singular complete elements wherein the plane and subject matter function synergistically. This contingency between flat plane and optical depth recalls for the viewer the painting’s titles––Nucleus, which connotes the atomic and molecular. The pipes make up the overall painting as atoms compose mass. They function as the central structural core, charged but balanced in their composition.

This exhibition will be closely followed by a major Lee Seung Jio retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Korea, forthcoming in June 2020.