The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, the first North American museum retrospective devoted to the artist-philosopher Lee Ufan (surname: Lee, given name: Ufan), a preeminent sculptor, painter, and writer active in Korea, Japan, and Europe over the last forty years. Exhibition on view through September 28, 2011.
The exhibition positions Lee as a historical figure and contemporary master, charting the artist’s creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for Post-Minimalist art. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on “the world as it is.”
Lee Ufan, “From Line,” 1977. Glue and mineral pigment on canvas 182 x 227 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn, Düsseldorf/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, courtesy Lee Ufan.
Featuring some ninety works from the 1960s to the present—including a new site-specific installation— the exhibition is installed throughout the museum, beginning with the rotunda floor and extending up the six ramps of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building and into two Annex Level galleries. Organized to reflect Lee’s method of working in iterative series, the selection of sculpture, paintings, works on paper, and installations includes Lee’s most iconic works, many presented in the United States for the first time. Objects are on loan from major public and private collections in Japan, Korea, Europe, and the United States. Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is on view from June 24 through September 28, 2011.
This exhibition is made possible with lead sponsorship from Samsung.
Major support is provided by the Korea Foundation. Generous support is also provided by The Japan Foundation. Additional support is provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. We recognize the Leadership Committee for the exhibition, including founding support from Timothy Blum; the Dedalus Foundation, Inc.; HyungTeh Do; Arne Glimcher; Marc Glimcher; Elvira González; Tina Kim; HyunSook Lee; Nicholas Logsdail; Isabel Mignoni; the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation; Jeff Poe; Thaddaeus Ropac; Rosemarie Schwarzwälder; Masami Shiraishi; Sadao Shirota; and Jill Silverman.
Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator, Asian Art, and Nancy Lim, former Asian Art Curatorial Fellow, provided curatorial support.
Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, noted, “Lee Ufan is an artist of extraordinary creative vision. Admired, even revered, abroad, Lee is surprisingly littleknown in North America, and this late-career survey, which we offer to the public as part of the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative, is overdue.”
“Samsung is proud to support this exhibition of the work of Lee Ufan. Samsung is a passionate patron of the arts, with many activities, from the opening of Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, in Seoul in 2004, to sponsored Korean art galleries and exhibitions in museums around the world. We are happy that Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity will bring the work of an outstanding and innovative artist to audiences in North America,” said David Steel, Executive Vice President at Samsung Electronics America.
The exhibition has been designed in close collaboration with the artist and features signature works from Lee’s sculptural series Relatum (1968–) as well as works from Lee’s five major series of paintings, works on paper, and prints spanning 1972 to the present: From Point and From Line (1972–84), From Winds (1982–86), With Winds (1987–91), Correspondance (1991–2006), and Dialogue (2006–). A selection of iconic work from Lee’s Mono-ha period offers a rare appearance of this vanguard movement in a U.S. museum.
Six key sculptures and paintings from the 1960s to the present are installed on the rotunda floor, the High Gallery, and Rotunda Level 1 as an introduction to the exhibition. These include Relatum (formerly Phenomena and Perception B) (1968/2011), a sculpture of the Mono-ha period that Lee re-creates for this exhibition comprising a large rock, a pane of glass, and a sheet of rolled steel. In an act of controlled chance, he drops the rock on the plates, cracking the glass on impact and bringing into being a relationship of coexistence between them. Also included in the introductory galleries is a recent painting, Dialogue (2007), a work comprising three panels, each featuring a single broad, gray-black brushstroke that hovers on an expanse of white canvas ground. Like much of Lee’s work, Dialogue activates a resonance between what is seen and unseen, made and not made.
For general information, call 212 423 3500 or visit guggenheim.org.