LEE UFAN AND MARK ROTHKO: CORRESPONDENCE

Pace is pleased to present Correspondence: Lee Ufan and Mark Rothko, a two-artist exhibition curated by Lee Ufan in collaboration with the Rothko family, at its Seoul gallery.

September 4 – October 26, 2024

The paintings of Rothko have long been celebrated for their ability to summon the sublime powers of color, dissolving fields of pigment into expanses of radiant atmosphere. Color is equally potent in Lee’s paintings, though it often emerges as a frozen gesture, in contrast to Rothko’s gesture-less surfaces. If Rothko’s indecipherable application of paint evokes the scumbles and fogs of late Titian—flooding the entire canvas and erasing any sense of line or hard contour—Lee’s forms are comparatively crisp and self-contained.

Yet both artists use color as a locus for eliciting a deeply contemplative state in the viewer, and both deal with the aesthetics of air, emptiness, and vapor in their work, investigating painting’s capacity to intensify our experience of color and to produce an effect that is at once awesome and meditative, conveying both power and quiescence.

Lee Ufan was a leading figure of the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha in the late 1960s. His artistic practice, which emphasizes the relationships between space, perception, and object, developed from his deep appreciation for nature and materiality. Rothko, a pioneer of the New York School, is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, known for his Color-field paintings of immense scale that are imbued with psychological and spiritual import.

While each artist’s work have a dedicated space and presented separately in the show in Seoul, the exhibition draws out the many resonances and intersections—in terms of color, surface, and atmosphere—that cut across both artists’ work.

For these two artists, painting becomes a tool for crystallizing the ephemeral into the concrete. Lee’s works capture the fleeting energy of a brushstroke and concretize it into the immediacy of color, making it feel as solid as stone. In a similar way, Rothko congeals atmosphere into the fixed stability of form.