Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 (hereafter ABMB 2023), from December 6 through 10, 2023, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. This year, 277 galleries from 34 countries will participate in the event; the fair continues to maintain its reputation as one of the most established and prominent fairs in North America by welcoming the inaugural participation of 25 galleries (spanning the Galleries, Positions, Nova, and Survey sectors) from countries including Egypt, Iceland, the Philippines, and Poland. Once again, ABMB 2023 presents different sectors including Galleries, the fair’s main sector; Kabinett, introducing curated exhibitions based on an art-historical approach; and Meridians, curated by Magalí Arriola, the Director of Museo Tamayo, for the fourth consecutive year and featuring nineteen innovative and monumental presentations pushing the boundaries of a traditional art fair layout. Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel, states: “Our offering this year demonstrates yet again the strength of our show as an engine of the world of art in the Americas and globally, and as an utterly transformative cross-cultural experience.”
Participating in the Galleries sector, Kukje Gallery will present a solo booth titled ‘Why passion flowers are not yellow?’ showcasing recent paintings and sculptures by Jean-Michel Othoniel, the internationally acclaimed contemporary artist and recent recipient of France’s prestigious Légion d'honneur. Over the past five decades, Othoniel has been producing works that explore diverse themes including reality and fantasy, beauty, and hope through the mediums of glass and painting. In the booth, the artist will unveil his latest painting series, Passion Flowers, to coincide with the fair. Prior to its inception, Othoniel acknowledged the fact that Florida—home to Miami—is one of the geographical origins of passion flower, the core inspiration for the series. As per the artist’s narrative, the yellow stamens of the passion flower, which are often overshadowed by its alluring blue-violet petals, dominate the composition. Othoniel describes this new series as follows:
"Why passion flowers are not yellow?" – Jean-Michel Othoniel
This new painting series entitled Passion Flowers was specially created for my Miami solo booth with Kukje Gallery.
I had the chance to live for three years in Miami in the late 1990s. The exuberant flora of Miami was the main source of inspiration for my exhibition Crystal Palace at MOCA Miami in 2004. This solo exhibition, curated by Bonnie Clearwater, was a turning point in my work affirming a poetic approach to my creation. It inspired an ardent passion for shapes and forms found in nature and a new way of working where I started to convert my watercolor drawings into glass sculptures.
My paintings on white gold backgrounds have often accompanied my sculptures, at exhibitions such as Secret Flower Sculptures (2015) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Narcissus Theorem (2021) at the Petit Palais, and more recently Treasure Gardens (2022) at the Seoul Museum of Art. In 2020, a series of six paintings on gold leaves inspired by roses were installed in the Puget courtyard of the Musée du Louvre as part of its permanent collection.
In Miami, I would like to present my new artistic experimentation on pure color and the exploration of abstract shapes inspired by nature. What I am looking for in this series of yellow paintings is illumination and joy. The inherent radiance from the paintings reminds us more of sunflowers than passion flowers, of which only the center is yellow. It is the star shape in the middle of the passion flower that inspired me to create these paintings, especially in a large polyptych structure. And it was the radicality of the yellow of the sunflowers that pushed me to affirm this immersion in color.
The dazzling sulfur yellow hue is reminiscent of earlier paintings made in Paris in 1989, when I threw molten sulfur on silver leaf. This time, the silver leaf has been replaced by white gold leaf, and the leaves have been beaten like the stormy sky, the radiance of the motif evoking sunshine breaking through clouds.
In Othoniel’s Passion Flowers series, the white gold leaf backdrop creates a subtle luminosity that mirrors its surroundings. Such element reveals the fact that the theme of “reflection” serves as a crucial mediation linking reality and fantasy in his works. As he describes, the vivid yellow hues in this series recall his earlier paintings created in 1989 in Paris, made with molten sulfur thrown on silver leaf. This recurring motif is also evident in his series La Rose du Louvre from 2019, commissioned by the Louvre Museum, which granted the artist an exceptional achievement of permanent acquisition by the museum.
The motif of “reflection” is further exemplified in the large stainless steel sculpture Noeud Miroir, presented alongside the paintings in the booth. A part of his Noeud series, a decade-long collaboration with the Mexican mathematician Aubin Arroyo, the work offers a visual articulation of the abstract notion of “Wild Knots,” which is an inherently non-representational quality that nonetheless finds expression through the glass beads’ reflection of their surroundings. As such, by artistically and visually illustrating this elusive concept of infinity, Othoniel has expanded his artistic practice combining lush aestheticism with scientific inquiry and rigor.
Meanwhile, Kukje Gallery is holding Roni Horn’s eponymous solo exhibition through December 31, 2023, at its K3 space, introducing 15 works (created between 2018 and 2023) belonging to the artist’s Frick and Fracks series. Scheduled as the finale of the gallery’s program this year is Lee Kwang-Ho’s solo exhibition BLOW-UP, featuring Lee’s recent paintings that employ the artist’s meticulous brushstrokes and keen depictions of nature, set to run from December 14, 2023, to January 28, 2024.
