Bumin Kim: Voice of Color

September 09 - October 08,2022

From Anya Tish Gallery: "Anya Tish Gallery is pleased to present Voice of Color, Korean-born, Texas-based artist, Bumin Kim’s solo exhibition with the gallery featuring the artist’s distinct thread on panel paintings. Bumin Kim’s intricate manipulation of materials highlights her ability to challenge the traditional model of what a painting should be. Brushstrokes become thread, and the flat surface is liberated to breathe into three-dimensional space. The artist acknowledges the transformative power of materiality at play, repurposing the context of thread to emphasize the energy, delicacy, and grace of painting. Bumin Kim employs simple and repetitive compositions, revealing a variety of distinctions in hue, depth, luminosity, and texture - this effect echoes pure tranquility and beauty. Although Kim’s work is much about line, structure, color, and light, these formal characteristics do not describe the works powerful emotional resonance. In this recent body of work, Kim has “been exploring how the colors talk, what stories are behind them, and the inner response they evoke” from the viewer. Moreover, Kim uses the thread as a symbol of connecting places, ideas, and people, that are otherwise not present in her current physical surroundings, like her family in South Korea. Kim’s abstracted landscapes voice her “current interests in music and poems,” and expand upon the associations between place, time, and memory. The flat arid plains, sunny skies and the starry nights of Texas inspire her work, blending in a distant harmony with the Korean landscape of her youth. Furthemore, the laborious works mystify and play with the viewer’s perception through the utilization of the multicolored threads and elemental shapes. The viewer is prompted to walk around her paintings to discover that the piece transforms as the threads appear to shift in somewhat of a moiré effect, an optical illusion that conveys kineticism and interactivity, placing Kim in the aesthetic realm of Bridget Riley and the Op art movement. Originally from South Korea, Bumin Kim received her MFA in Drawing and Painting in 2015 from the University of North Texas, Denton, TX. In 2017 she was awarded at the 30th Annual International Competition and Exhibition, Materials: Hard + Soft in Patterson-Appleton Arts Center, Denton, TX. Her work has been shown by various institutions such as: Pulse Art Fair in Miami, FL; Dallas Art Fair in Dallas, TX; Art Aspen in Aspen, CO; Texas Contemporary Art Fair in Houston, TX; Women & Their Work in Austin, TX; most recently the AT&T gallery in Dallas, TX. Kim’s work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as: New American Paintings, Fresh Paint Magazine, and Glasstire, and can be found in numerous corporate and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. In 2020, Bumin Kim completed an artist residency at Facebook’s Headquarters in Austin, TX."

Reception: September 09, 2022 | 5-8 pm

Anya Tish Gallery 4411 Montrose
Houston, TX 77006
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