KIM YUN SHIN: ADD TWO ADD ONE
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Add Two Add One, a two-part solo exhibition of work by pioneering Korean artist Kim Yun Shin.
February 27 - March 15, 2025
This two-part exhibition comes on the heels of a breakthrough year for the artist, who joined Lehmann Maupin’s program in early 2024, marking Kim’s first commercial gallery representation in her nearly seven-decade career. Also in 2024, Kim’s work was prominently included in Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Kim’s work is included in museum collections worldwide, including recent acquisitions by the Singapore Art Museum, the Harvard Art Museum, and the Seoul Museum of Art; most recently, a historic sculpture from the late 1980s was acquired by the Guggenheim Museum in New York and will enter the permanent collection.
Growing up amidst the backdrop of Korea’s tumultuous history in the 20th century, Kim Yun Shin has established herself as a formative figure in the post-war South Korean art scene, overcoming societal norms to carve out a space for herself as a first-generation woman sculptor. Despite facing challenges in a male-dominated field, she ventured to Paris to pursue her artistic aspirations, taught at various universities, and co-founded the Korean Sculptress Association in 1974 to support emerging artists.
Her artistic practice, which encompasses sculpture and painting, is also deeply rooted in encounters with the natural world. Kim’s sculptural work engages with the fundamental qualities of materials and nature, navigating themes of confrontation, introspection, and coexistence. Using solid wood as her primary medium, she visualizes the intersection between nature, time, and history, reconsidering the very essence of human existence. Her early sculptures from the 1970s are deeply rooted in traditional Korean hanok architecture, which uses a distinctive technique that joins wooden blocks without nails. Her colorful paintings, meanwhile, are marked by distinctive surface fragmentation; across her compositions, large sections gradually divide into smaller shapes. The resulting artworks evoke a primordial energy, at once expansive and concise, concentrated and diffused. For Kim, painting offers the opportunity to explore sculptural concepts in a two-dimensional format.
Across both exhibitions, Kim’s paintings and sculptures locate the essence of her unique diasporic experience amidst the grounding consistency of a spiritual connection to the natural world. Decades of creative production unfold from one series to the next in both London and New York, paying homage to Kim’s journey from turbulent beginnings during the Japanese colonial period and Korean War to becoming a trailblazer in Korean contemporary art and reflecting the artist’s personal resilience and commitment to artistic innovation.