Byron Kim with Grunion Run, 2001. Photo: Dennis Cowley.
Byron Kim
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
2155 Center Street
September 15–December 12
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego | Downtown
1100 and 1001 Kettner Boulevard
May 29–September 4
Samsung Museum of Modern Art
March 10–May 8
Byron Kim’s exquisitely subjective monochromes are suspended between the reflective, heady abstraction of Reinhardt, Marden, and Rothko and the deft, politically incisive Conceptualism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Glenn Ligon. Alternately indexing skin, Korean celadon pottery, a station wagon, and even a Brooklyn public pool, his paintings will be shown to great effect in his first major solo museum exhibition. Against the BAM’s neo-brutalist architecture, the hazy atmospheric surface effects of these thirty-two works should betray an unbearable lightness of being.
