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In first grade, Bryon Kim was dazzled by his teacher. Because she said she liked his striped turtleneck, he wore it every day for the next three weeks.
Kim honors the longing that filled his pint-size self with a painting titled, "Miss Mushinski (First Big Crush)," from 1996, although there are no clues to this content on the surface of the painting itself. It's a blue/green, horizontally striped rectangle, the size of his chest at age 6.
Fifty years ago, this painting would get no respect. Back then, what you saw was what you got in abstract art. Reacting to the perceived excesses of the romantic sublime (Abstract Expressionism, otherwise known as the New York School), abstract artists were straight up with no chaser in their content. The medium was the message.
Frank Stella's pinstripe paintings from that period are not critiques of corporate culture. They're just pinstripes, his way of carving up space. And Bridget Riley's undulating lines may mess with your retinal focus, but she didn't intend them to imply meaning beyond the edges of her canvases.
Today, Kim is an innovator in a new kind of serialism. His surfaces may be plain, but you need the back story to plumb their depths. He helped set the movement in motion with an oil and wax-on-panel painting titled "Synecdoche," or a part standing for a whole. Painted in 1991 and featuring 390 luscious little squares hung together, it made his reputation as "the skin guy" in 1993, when shown at the Whitney Biennial.
Each square represents a skin tone. Each comes from a person who sat for him for 20 minutes, some friends, some strangers -- the human family as an abstract rainbow.
"Threshold: Bryon Kim: 1990-2004" is a midcareer survey conceived by Eugenie Tsai and organized by Constance Lewallen, senior curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum.
"Threshold" is an excellent choice for the Henry, as Seattle has become a stronghold of abstract serialism.
Just for starters, there's Jaq Chartier's fragments of genetic code; Jeffrey Simmons' intestinal grids; Lisa Liedgren's notched moon phases; Gina Han's East Asian Pop; and Robert McNown's domestic subversions.
There's Lynne Woods Turner's fingerprints; Denzil Hurley's magisterial notations; John Dempcy's craters simulating percussive sound; Tom DeGroot's industrial sunsets; Joseph Goldberg's ghost landscapes; Margie Livington's trees having nervous breakdowns; Allen Fulle's radiantly slimy pools (now on view at William Traver Gallery); and Alicia Berger's personal geography, such as the abstraction that maps a walk to her girlfriend's apartment (on view at G. Gibson Gallery).
Kim is a wonderful painter. Whatever his subject, his work has a sense of air and light. He's attracted to skies and likes his paintings to have a sense of breath, of air moving through the colors.
"Please Don't Touch" from 1991 is a dark red field inflected with darker reds. It brings to mind the speckled light moving through Corot's trees, John Constable's mud and Mark Rothko's sense of float. The key to the content is in the title. Those darker reds are fingerprints.
Painting for him is memory made visible through color coding. He knows whose fingerprints are on his painting, and the painting is their portrait.
I love his "Belly" paintings, a series in wax on linen and panel he began in 1990 and continued through 2004.
He wanted to make the thickest painting he could. When he realized midway that others had outdone him in this ambition, he let the wax sag on the frame. Friends told him he was making bellies. His acceptance of their idea led him to "Synecdoche" and the particular path his painting has taken since.
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