Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Frieze Seoul 2023 with a presentation of new and historic works by artists including Richard Aldrich, Matthew Barney, Claudia Comte, Carroll Dunham, Keith Haring, Alex Katz, Philippe Parreno, David Rappeneau, Robert Rauschenberg, Ugo Rondinone, David Salle, Salvo, Frances Stark, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Williams, and Anicka Yi.
Multidisciplinary artist Matthew Barney’s career-spanning series, DRAWING RESTRAINT, explores the body and its limits by challenging the politics of gender, sexuality, and codified beliefs through film, drawing, and sculpture. This series was exhibited in Korea for the first time in 2005 at the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul as part of the artist’s traveling exhibition, DRAWING RESTRAINT Volume 3. Nearly two decades later, Barney’s first show with the Gallery in Seoul featured the artist’s 25th installment in the series, DRAWING RESTRAINT 25 (2022). The full body of work will be on view, including the silent film, charcoal drawing, and sculptural vitrine which bares charcoal drawings, cast brass, burned tree-limbs and more—all elements used in the ritualized performance Barney and his daughter execute in the video.
Alex Katz is considered one of the most prominent and prolific American painters of the last 50 years. Over the course of his career, Katz developed a unique approach to contemporary representational paintings known for their “casual accuracy.” The Gallery will present large-scale portraits by the artist, including those from the artist’s ongoing “splits” series; these compositions utilize a unique cut-up technique that emulates cinematic and dramatic camera framings, as well as the fractured imagery of early cubism. On September 5, Katz will open an exhibition of new flower paintings at Gladstone Seoul. Katz’s flower paintings—which he has been making for over six decades—demonstrate the artist’s ability to visually communicate the simplicity and beauty of their subject. Following Katz’s exhibition at Gladstone Seoul, David Rappeneau will have an exhibition of drawings opening on November 1, 2023. A drawing by Rappeneau showcasing his striking and surreal fusion of fantasy and reality will also be on view.
Ugo Rondinone’s examination of the link between the natural world and the human condition spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. For Frieze Seoul, Gladstone will present a dedicated room featuring the artist’s nuns + monks sculptures. These works, made of cast bronze and painted in vivid, day-glo colors, prompt the viewer to revel in the sensory experiences of color, form, and mass while simultaneously activating an altogether contemporary version of the sublime. Rondinone’s multimedia installation vocabulary of solitude and one of his iconic neon rainbows are on view at PODO Museum until September 3, 2023.
Since the 1990s, Rirkrit Tiravanija has aligned his artistic production with an ethic of social engagement, challenging conventional notions of art and fostering communal engagement. The artist’s social and political way of engaging with audiences can be seen in his new diptych. In this work, Tiravanija layers silver leaf on Korean newspapers about the North Korean satellite launch, embracing the material’s democratic nature of information dissemination to invite reflection into a collective memory. Concurrently with the fair, Tiravanija will open an exhibition in Seoul organized by Shinsegae Gallery in collaboration with Gladstone, Galerie Chantal Crousel, kurimanzutto, and Pilar Corrias. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Korea, SUBMIT TO THE BLACK COMPOST, was with Gladstone in
2022. Tiravanija combines and negotiates different methods of traditional craft, cultural contexts, and materials to question the value of objects within and beyond the white cube. The first U.S. survey and largest exhibition of the artist’s work, A LOT OF PEOPLE, opens next month at MoMA PS1. This exhibition traces four decades of the artist’s career and features over 100 works, from early experimentations with installation and film, to drawings, sculpture, and key participatory works.
David Salle, a recent addition to the Gallery’s program, explores image-making and pure painting in a new body of work only on view at the fair. Salle repurposes previous works by enlarging, cropping, reprinting, and then painting over existing images to create new ones. Figures and bodies are overlaid with various motifs, creating complex and saturated images of Salle’s past, present and future. Similarly, Richard Aldrich will be presenting a new work which exemplifies the artist’s concerns in the journey of abstraction and the development of painting. Aldrich recently exhibited in 2022 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan in the group show An Exhibition with Little Information.
Philippe Parreno’s practice is centered around the facilitation of singular experiences and series of exchanges, which he prioritizes over the production of art objects. Gladstone’s inaugural exhibition in Seoul, Mineral Mutations (2022), was emblematic of the artist’s ability to create multimedia environments that invite viewers to re-evaluate the nature of reality, memory, and the passage of time. On view at the fair is 100 Questions, 50 Lives, a diptych from a recent series of preparatory drawings and paintings made for an upcoming film project. Functioning as storyboards for the film, these works deftly visualize the imagined realities and landscapes that the artist is known to construct. Parreno has an upcoming exhibition at Gladstone in New York, Hertzian Tales, that layers sculpture, video, and sound to create a body of seemingly sentient work that reacts to stimuli within the interdependent environment it creates.
Anicka Yi has produced a unique body of work for the last decade that lies at the intersection of politics and macrobiotics. Yi’s practice is the result of an alchemic process of experimentation, exploring often incompatible materials and challenging formalist conventions of painting. On view are works from a new series by Yi, which are presented in Korea for the first time. In these works, the artist demonstrates her continued interest in inventive and unexpected approaches to creation by investigating how machine intelligence might influence the evolution of painting. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Korea, BEGIN WHERE YOU ARE (2022), was held last year at the Gallery.
Claudia Comte’s recent immersive exhibition, Marine Wildfire & Underwater Forests (2023), presented the artist’s new series of marble reliefs and a site-specific, expansive, wall painting at Gladstone Seoul. With titles drawn from newspaper articles about climate change, the reliefs expand on the artist’s ever- evolving understanding of natural materials and the careful authority of human intervention.