Lehmann Maupin returns to Frieze Seoul with a focused presentation that celebrates the gallery’s Korean artists of historical significance, including Do Ho Suh, Lee Bul, and Sung Neung Kyung. The booth will also spotlight work by international artists with current and forthcoming solo exhibitions in the gallery’s space in Seoul’s Hannam-dong neighborhood, including Loriel Beltrán and David Salle. Salle’s exhibition World People is on view through October 28th, and Beltrán will make his Korean debut in November. As one of the first international galleries to establish a permanent space in Seoul six years ago, Lehmann Maupin is firmly committed to Korea and its artists, many of whom have been a pillar of the program since the gallery’s inception. The works on view at Frieze Seoul illustrate the gallery’s continued intention to foster a diverse and global contemporary program in Asia and to support artists throughout the region.
Do Ho Suh’s Scaled Behaviour series explores notions of the uncanny; specifically, it extends Suh’s interest in the politics of touch. Through a complex process that involves robotics and 3D printing, Suh produced the new works on view ScaledBehaviour_runOn(doorknob_11.4.1), ScaledBehaviour_runOn(doorknob_2.4.2), and ScaledBehaviour_runOn(doorknob_12.4.1) (all 2023) based on an automated drawing made via script from an architectural modeling software. The result is a labyrinthine form (in this case, the shape of a doorknob) that acknowledges both its digital origins and its analogue production, collapsing distinctions between the virtual and the tactile. The works raise questions about control and authorship, and present a subtle reframing of traditional ideas around the all-important ‘hand of the artist.’
In conjunction with his participation in the group exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Sung Neung Kyung will present historical works from his acclaimed Venue series (1985). Sung’s Venue works demonstrate the artist's long-standing interest in the dynamic between language and power—here, the artist has arranged press photographs cut from newspapers in neat lines and added white markings, like arrows and circles, to their surfaces. In this way, Sung critiques media censorship and suggests alternative modes of knowledge production and information sharing. Sung will have a focused presentation at Lehmann Maupin New York this fall, followed by a major solo exhibition in 2024.
The gallery’s presentation includes a new Perdu painting by Seoul-based artist Lee Bul. Composed of multi-layered organic and inorganic materials like mother of pearl and acrylic paint, Bul’s Perdu works depict otherworldly and fragmented cyborg-like bodies that are suspended in space at various distances and in differing detail. These undefined forms emerge from brightly-hued fields of color as if proliferating or expanding; they inhabit a liminal space between biology and technology. In this way, the artist’s Perdu works gesture towards both a yearning for completeness and an unspecified yet proximate process for achieving such a state.
In tandem with his solo exhibition World People at the gallery’s Seoul location, several new paintings by American artist, curator, and writer David Salle will debut at the fair. World People marks Salle’s second solo exhibition with Lehmann Maupin in Seoul, celebrating a longstanding relationship with the gallery. In his Tree of Life works, on view at the fair, Salle mobilizes breezy caricature and gestural abstraction to dramatize matters of art and life across formal, conceptual, and psychological registers. These paintings stage dramatic vignettes where cartoon characters dialogue and interact with one another, roiled from below by swathes of colorful, painterly abstraction. The works on view both suggest and withhold a sense of resolution, unearthing a near-universal human tendency to search for and project narratives.
On view for the first time in Korea are new paintings by Venezuelan-American artist Loriel Beltrán. Recognized for his unique approach to abstraction, Beltrán employs a labor-intensive process that accumulates paint and color, defying traditional notions of painting and sculpture by fusing the two. The dimensional surface of Beltrán’s GP (Black and Blue) (2023) is composed of highly-textured paint strips. First cast in a mold then layered atop a wooden substrate to create a pulsating optical effect, the work explores the interplay of color and light across surface and volume. This November, Beltrán will debut a new body of work in his first solo exhibition at our Seoul gallery.
Other highlights include a large-scale copper panel work by Nari Ward, who will open a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin London this fall; new paintings and sculptures by Korean artist Hong Soun; two new paintings by English artist Billy Childish; a selection of new portrait paintings from London-based artist Chantal Joffe; and two new paintings by Vietnamese-American artist Tammy Nguyen, whose solo exhibition at the ICA Boston is on view through January 28, 2024. The presentation will also feature Erwin Wurm’s Dream (2023) and Mold (Flat Sculptures) (2021) in conjunction with his current solo exhibition Trap of the Truth at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (on view through April 2024), as well as a historical latex work by late artist Heidi Bucher, whose solo exhibition Heidi Bucher: Beyond the Skins is on view at the Red Brick Museum in Beijing through October 8, 2023.
