I got invited out to the Guggenheim later this month and while I'm still thinking about going, while you might not be able to attend the press event, you can still think about your schedule this summer (because even though spring just got here we can't help thinking about those hot days that afterwards).
Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity
June 24–September 28, 2011
This exhibition is made possible with lead sponsorship from Samsung.
Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is the first North American museum retrospective devoted to artist, philosopher, and poet Lee Ufan, who has been active in Korea, Japan, and Europe over the last forty years. The exhibition charts the artist’s creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical language that has radicalized and expanded the possibilities for sculpture and painting. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that emphasizes process, materials, and the experiential engagement of viewer and site. The exhibition features some ninety works from the 1960s to the present—including a new site-specific installation—and will be installed throughout the museum, beginning with the rotunda floor and extending up the six ramps of the building and into two Annex galleries. The selection of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and installations includes Lee’s most iconic works, many presented in America for the first time.
Lee Ufan was born in Korea in 1936. He earned a degree in philosophy from Nihon University, Tokyo, and has from the earliest stages of his work been critically engaged with the writings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Nishida Kitaro. In the late 1960s, Lee came to international prominence as the visionary theorist and most representative practitioner of the influential Japanese art movement Mono-ha (School of Things), applying the theories of structuralism and phenomenology to construct a model of otherness that was highly critical of modernism and in dialogue with international Post-Minimalist practices.
Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator of Asian Art, and Nancy Lim, Asian Art Curatorial Fellow, provided curatorial support. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
