Following his one-man show in the stately gardens and chateau at Versailles in 2014, the Korean-born master Lee Ufan returns to his Parisian gallerist Kamel Mennour for this solo exhibition, bringing together a suite of recent paintings made this year from his “Dialogue” series, and juxtaposing them with twelve watercolors dating from 1983.Relying on an extremely pared down repertoire of painterly strokes and gestures, these commanding paintings nonetheless create a massive resonance. Made up of single painted sweeps that have in fact been built up through manifold layers of repeated, smaller strokes, these works bear the trace of a brush that gradually discharges its load of paint to the point of total evacuation, each successive mark tending towards a notional immaterial threshold that is never quite reached.Although primarily known as a founding member and theoretician of the Mono-ha (“School of Things”) movement, which came to prominence among an elite coterie of Japanese artists chiefly in the late 1960s and early 70s, Lee’s revelation that art consisted in the relational processes that unfolded between two things, or a thing and a space, was most fully realized in his sculptural installations.By contrast, the creation of his paintings hinges on an almost punishingly solitary process that is akin to an ascetic form of meditation. In his book The Art of Resonance, Lee writes: “I must, in my painting, challenge myself alone. The event that takes place between the canvas and myself is almost a secret rite, completely closed to the surrounding world.”It is this intriguing divergence between Lee’s painterly and sculptural explorations that promises to pique the interest of those familiar with the work of other leading Mono-ha artists such as Kishio Suga, Nobuo Sekine, and Susumu Koshimizu.And although chiefly associated with a postwar art movement that originated in his adopted home of Japan, the Korean-born Lee might also be profitably aligned — at least in the context of his painting practice — with the aesthetic approaches of the Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement, whose practitioners also often speak of a ritualistic emptying of the mind in order to produce their work.Lee Ufan’s exhibition runs at Kamel Mennour, 6 rue du Pont de Lodi through July 23, 2016, and 28 Avenue Matignon from June 22 through July 23, 2016.
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