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, 2004
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego | Downtown
1100 and 1001 Kettner Boulevard
May 29–September 4, 2005
Samsung Museum of Modern Art
March 10–May 8, 2005
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.
