The upcoming edition of Kiaf will bring together 210 galleries from 20 countries, marking the representative domestic fair’s most international edition to date. Launched in 2002, Kiaf has consistently focused not only on young, forward-looking, and dynamic contemporary art based in Asia including Korean artists but has also presented special exhibitions reflecting recent trends in the art scene and diverse talk programs to engage collectors and viewers in Korea and beyond.
Kukje Gallery will present a solo booth dedicated to the acclaimed Swiss contemporary artist Ugo Rondinone. The booth will highlight recent paintings that employ a colorful palette and other works in various media to survey Rondinone’s extensive artistic oeuvre. The booth will introduce the artist’s watercolor series, mattituck, depicting the sunset at his home in Mattituck on Long Island, New York. By limiting the palette to only three hues for each painting, Rondinone captures the delicate moment of sundown—when the sun slips below the horizon—with a concise color composition to evoke the universal human experience of time and beauty. By narrowing the chromatic range of these works to complementary colors, the artist creates discernible images that are nevertheless optically charged, conveying the magic of this special hour.
Featured alongside is the horizons series, sculptures of horses cast from blue glass, slightly smaller than life-size. Each sculpture is bisected horizontally with two distinct shades of transparent blue, alluding to a horizon running through the silhouette of the horse. The artist overturns the traditional formula of the body being contained in a landscape, to the landscape being confined inside the body, implying a microcosmic world. Also on view will be the peace (2022), an opaque glass panel inserted into a window frame creating a nontransparent porthole. The reflective surfaces of each window-like form reflect viewers back to themselves and the interior of the space, inducing a meditative state. The booth will also present light green clock (2022), which includes the Roman numerals often seen in a regular clock but has no hands, thereby suggesting not only the passage of time but something more metaphysical. Created with stained-glass, the work resembles the way this material represents spiritual transcendence and mysticality in religious environments, such as churches.
As a horse become a vessel for a seascape, as a window reflects the viewer inside and its interiority rather than its exteriority, and as a clock embodies time but does not tell it, Rondinone’s works function as a poetic vehicle that transports the viewer to another dimension. Kukje Gallery’s solo booth for Ugo Rondinone showcases the artist’s remarkable balance of wit, lyricism, and generosity coupled with a deep commitment to humanity through his works.
Rondinone’s works are currently on view in two solo exhibitions at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, U.S., as well as group exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Nîmes, France, and Sculpture Milwaukee, U.S.
To coincide with Frieze Seoul and Kiaf, Kukje Gallery will be holding the contemporary master Anish Kapoor’s solo exhibition across all three spaces (K1, K2, K3) of the gallery from August 30 through October 22, 2023, in Seoul. The upcoming exhibition will present four monumental sculptures alongside powerful paintings and gouache drawings. Simultaneously, the gallery’s Hanok will showcase Haegue Yang’s presentation Latent Dwelling from August 30 to October 8, 2023. The presentation actively engages with the Hanok’s current “latent” state, a temporal stage before its renovation as a formal exhibition space.
Kukje Gallery Busan will present A Stranger to Strangers, Wook-kyung Choi’s first solo exhibition in Busan from August 25 through October 22, 2023, presenting 26 works on paper, emotionally charged ink drawings and prints, along with 8 works of croquis, created during her years while studying in the U.S.
