Davide Balliano (b. 1983, Turin) is an artist whose research operates on the thin line of demarcation between painting and sculpture. Utilizing an austere, minimal language of abstract geometries in strong dialogue with architecture, his work investigates existential themes such as the identity of man in the age of technology and his relationship with the sublime. The artworks included in our Frieze presention belong to a new body of works Davide created for his recent solo exhibition at the gallery. 

Ghada Amer (b. 1963, Cairo) uses her erotic embroideries to reappropriate traditional motifs of misogyny and hypersexualization of women. She at once rejects oppressive laws set in place to govern women’s bodies and repudiates the first-wave feminist theory that the body must be denied to prevent victimization. Her works explore dichotomies of an uneasy world, confronting the language of hostility and finality with narratives of longing and love. As seen above Amer’s multimedia practice also includes bronze sculptures, paintings on cardboard, as well as, ceramics and garden installations, with her quintessential motif reappearing across material boundaries.

Wook-Kyung Choi (b. 1940) graduated from the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University in 1963. Shortly after, Choi moved to the United States to expand her education as well as artistic career, studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and receiving her MA in Fine Arts from the Brooklyn Museum School of Art. From 1968 to 1971, Choi taught painting at Franklin Pierce College as an Assistant Professor. She continued her career as an artist and professor after she returned to Korea in 1978, teaching at Yeungnam University and later at Duksung Women’s University. Throughout her short yet prolific artistic career until her death at the age of 45, she was most known for her association with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art which were the main movements in the United States at the time. The influence of these schools distinguished her from other Korean artists and the dominant contemporary groups at the time such as Korean Avant-garde who worked with performance and installation and Dansaekhwa. Choi’s challenge to the orthodoxy of the Korean art scene came in many different forms: abstract paintings, ink drawings, paper collages, and figure drawings.

Tania Pérez Córdova (b. 1979, Mexico) quiet and contemplative works relate to temporality and the lifespan of objects. With her installations having often been likened to film sets, she uses language to situate each work within a larger narrative, forgoing the autonomy of objects in favor of their integral role within a nexus. Her practice spans across media, incorporating sculpture, photography, found objects, and activation or performance. Objects function as characters in Córdova’s installations. With her guidance and care they seem to undergo narrative arcs and inherent changes. Verbal clues in artwork titles incite the viewer to consider both the lifespan of the object and the practices and actions that were involved in its making. She considers media in an abstract sense, often embedding actions and situations into an object as a material itself. Such references to the world beyond the sculpture itself create a vivid sense of time and space outside the gallery. She strategically widens the nuanced relationship between artwork and viewer to include external places, people, and actions. 

“We are governed by size, material, color, and form when we analyze objects... What’s more, these factors are themselves invested with their own implicit political innuendo.”

Gimhongsok’s (b. 1964) balloon sculptures specifically refer to the rampant socioeconomic inequality that emerged in Korea following the Korean War as the country modernized rapidly. Before casting, each balloon was inflated by someone in the artist’s life—a friend, family member, student, someone working in the foundry, etc—who was then allowed to select the color of the balloon. In capturing the breath within the balloon, each individual cast functioned as something of a conceptual portrait. The artist then stacked the bronze casts at random, visually equalizing those he enlisted to contribute.

Suki Seokyeong Kang’s (b. 1977) research-driven practice spans across media, incorporating sculpture, painting, video, installation, and performance, as she investigates the notion of space and its relationship to an individual’s social position within society. Kang appropriates the formal language of the grid used in traditional Korean musical notation as a spatial and social structuring device. The grid is translated and reproduced as standing formations in her works that balance against, hinge on, and even protrude from the wall. In her works, the sculptures in the space appear and are further activated in her videos or performances. Hwamunseok– mats used in traditional Korean court dances – produced from woven sedge by Korean craftswomen. Each of these signals the minimum space an individual is provided in society. As these notations multiply, Kang configures them into a rich visual score suggesting the possibility of a collective consciousness rooted in individual action.  

Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929-2021), one of the most influential 20th century Korean painters, was born in the North of a then-Unified Korea and migrated to the South later to escape the Communist regime. He studied in New York and later settled in Paris, where he began developing his signature motif-the drop of water. Kim’s hyperreal drops navigate between diverse modes of abstract expressionism, minimalism, and photorealism. Kim referred to his unceasing act of painting as a remedy for him to erase traumatic memories of the Korean War. 

Kim Yong-Ik (b. 1947)'s prominent refusal to be categorized within the dominant art movements of the 1970s and 1980s played a significant role in the evolution of contemporary art in Korea. Kim studied at Hongik University in the school’s renowned oil painting department under Park Seo-Bo, a figurehead of the country’s Dansaekhwa movement, who exerted strong influence on the South Korean art scene at the time. Kim’s group and solo exhibitions after graduating all focused on his Plane Object series, which features spans of cloth of roughly human scale that are stained, creased, and then displayed directly on the gallery walls without a frame. Later, in the 1990s  Kim turned his focus to a new series: his dot paintings, which feature the repetition of seemingly crisp geometric circles. Rooted in modernist painting, Kim Yong-Ik's self-reflective practice continuously questions the relationship between the avant-garde and society. 

Kwon Young-Woo’s (1926-2013) works explore the relationship between traditional materials and abstract expression. The artist is considered as a pioneer in Korean abstract art known as Dansaekhwa. He enrolled at Seoul National University‟s art school as a member of its first class with a major in Oriental Painting in 1946, and also earned a Master of Fine Arts from the same school in 1957. 

In his early career, Kwon worked with ink painting to achieve pure harmony of paper and ink; however, in the early 1960s he soon began working solely with paper and developed his own style. Insisting only on paper, Kwon moved away from brush and black-stone ink and challenged traditional Western uses of paper and canvas. He would use his fingernails to scratch and tear paper and then stack another layer over it. Kwon‟s layers-upon-layers of glued paper turned flat canvas into three- dimensional sculpture. By defying the conventional use of paper, Kwon added a new dimension by being able to view the tactile of paper from all directions. Along with this technique, Kwon also took advantage of the blotting nature of ink by applying it onto the torn edges of his paper.

Kibong Rhee (b. 1957) achieves a perfect sense of the ephemeral in his hazy, dreamlike landscape paintings, in which he layers painted plexiglass and sheer fabric above canvas in order to create a convincing optical depth that draws the viewer in. The scenes in these works appear to be in the process of either disappearing and taking form, capturing a between a moment in time and space. The diaphanous quality of these images is informed by the foggy and humid landscape surrounding Rhee’s studio in Korea. Water plays a crucial role in these paintings, as Rhee believes that water, in its variety of forms, embodies the fleetingness of life.

A seminal figure in Korean contemporary art and a founding member of the Dansaekhwa movement, Park Seo-Bo’s (b. 1931, Yecheon) works perfectly demonstrate the commitment to methods and materials that distinguishes a Dansaekhwa painting. In the 1970s Park began his Ecriture series, a repetition of script-like graphite markings carved into wet oil paint. Last year Park partnered with ArtNedition to create a series of high-quality textured prints of this early body of work. Later in the 1980s until recently, Park experimented with the materiality of Hanji paper. Incorporating his own hands or tools, the artist would repeatedly press the wet surface of Hanji so that the soft layers of paper could be gently pushed and manipulated to create new forms. 

Born 1930 in Tokyo, Japan, Minoru Niizuma immigrated to the United States in the postwar period, following his education at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and his subsequent local success exhibiting with the Modern Art Association in Tokyo. Settling in New York in 1959, Niizuma joined the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1964 as a teacher, while simultaneously stepping deep into the emerging artistic cluster that came to be affiliated with the term “Minimalism.” Throughout his life, Niizuma worked in series, mostly focusing on refining and iterating a single form over the course of several years. With his carved stone works, sitting on the edge of symbolic figuration with their distinctive juxtapositions of smooth and rugged texture, Niizuma was included in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim. Niizuma also privileged other means of exposing the public to his works, his works prized in both institutional and commercial sculpture gardens. As a result, he began to place works in museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Guggenheim, SFMOMA and the Museum of Modern Art. 
Following his six years at the Brooklyn Museum, Niizuma was named an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught from 1972 through 1984. In the early 80’s, he began a pivot that would carry him into the last 20 years of his life and work, when he traveled to Portugal as part of the Evora Symposium. The immense array of marble and stone available in the European nation  brought Niizuma back time and time again, eventually resulting in a partnership with Portuguese President Mario Soares to build artistic exchange between Portugal and Japan. Niizuma passed away in 1998.