Installation view of Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June...

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will be presenting Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, the first North American museum retrospective devoted to the artist-philosopher Lee Ufan a preeminent sculptor, painter, and writer active in Korea, Japan, and Europe over the last forty years.
The exhibition positions Lee as a historical figure and contemporary master, charting the artist’s creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical language that has radically expanded the possibilities for Post-Minimalist art. His deliberately limited and distilled gestures, guided by an ethics of restraint, produce emptiness that is generative and vivid; it is this sense of infinitude that forms the material and substance of his art.
Featuring some ninety works from the 1960s to the present—including a new site-specific installation— the exhibition will be installed throughout the museum, beginning with the rotunda floor and extending up the six ramps of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building and into two Annex Level galleries. The selection of sculpture, paintings, works on paper, and installations includes Lee’s most iconic works, many presented in the United States for the first time. Objects are on loan from major public and private collections in Japan, Korea, Europe, and the United States.

Lee Ufan: Relatum—a signal, 2005. Steel and stone, Plate, 3 x 260 x 240 cm; stone, approximately 100 cm high, Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, Japan, Permanent installation, Lee Ufan Museum, Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, Japan. ©Tadasu Yamamoto, courtesy Lee Ufan Museum

In 2010, the Lee Ufan Museum, designed by Tadao Ando, opened at Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Japan; and in 2011, Lee’s work will be featured in two venues at the Venice Biennale, Palazzo Bembo and Palazzo Grassi.
Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is on view from June 24 through September 28, 2011.

Published 23.06.2011