Cahiers d’Art is pleased to present untitled utopias, the first exhibition in France of Korean artist Kim Yong-Ik. The exhibition features three new series of prints produced this year by the artist, in collaboration with Cahiers d’Art, at the renowned Idem print studio in Paris. The first series, Untitled 18 1 – 18 6, in an edition of only 12, draws inspiration from Ik’s instantly recognizable dot paintings. Echoing the seriality of his predecessors within Korea but seeking to remove the artist’s hand, these works have a feeling of machine-made uniformity created through the lithographic printing process itself. The second series, Utopia 18 1 – 18 6, focuses on the artist’s interest in geometric abstraction, as well as the interplay between different surfaces. For this series Kim Yong-Ik combines collage with drawn rectangular shapes and colored dots or rectangles, neither of which is given more importance over the other. As a way to continue this investigation into the hand-made and the machine-made, both of the above series, Untitled and Utopia, are also presented in hand-painted versions, available as a complete suite of six. The Cahiers d’Art exhibition additionally features two unique works on paper, one diptych and one triptych, informing and complimenting the print series.
Cahiers d’Art also publishes, in collaboration with Tina Kim and Kukje Gallery, a 138-page monograph on Kim Yong-Ik, focusing on the time the artist spent in Paris in 2018 and at Cahiers d’Art. The book, released in 2019, includes texts by Philippe Vergne and Beck Jee-Sook, extracts from the interview between Kim Yong-Ik and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Kim’s statement “Politics of Ambiguity.” Cahiers d’Art publisher Staffan Ahrenberg writes a personal foreword to the new book .