In the 1960s the South Korean artist Lee Ufan became involved with Mono-ha (‘School of Things’), a Tokyo-based group that, through experimentation with industrial materials, honed a mode of making art that aimed to privilege the viewer and erase, to some extent, the imprint of the artist on a work. As an official movement Mono-ha was short-lived, but those principles have guided Lee’s art since then: many of the artist’s sculptural installations are minimalist almost to the point of conceptualism and require slow, meditative looking to appreciate fully. To celebrate Lee’s 90th birthday, Dia Beacon is holding a retrospective of his work that includes three Relatum sculptures from the ’60s and ’70s, which consist of careful arrangements of stones, wooden poles, glass and other materials, as well as some of Lee’s restrained yet seductive paintings (8 May–). The exhibition runs concurrently with a show at the San Marco Art Centre in Venice, which features work from across his career and a new site-specific installation.
Find out more from Dia Beacon’s website.
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