Mie Yim's Inferno is the New York-based Korean artist's (Seoul, 1963) first solo exhibition with the gallery in collaboration with Villa Magdalena and co-curated by Cy Schnabel. This show of paintings from 2021 to the present comes as a result of the canvas, Last Dance (2023), a recent work which reveals the artist's exploration of certain symbolic forms and subjects. Yim's mutant imagery continues to morph: built up surfaces and unstable organic compositions have come to characterize her mature painting practice (or "recent oeuvre"). The title of the presentation, a reference to the epic poem by Dante Alighieri and The Trammps' hit 70's song, creates a liminal space that symbolically accompanies the pictures on view as they relate to a vulnerable but formative period of the artist's assimilation into American culture. Throughout the exhibit, the artist constructs her own fiction of heaven and hell, good and evil.
About the Artist
Mie Yim (b. 1963, S. Korea) works primarily in painting, drawing and occasionally other media. The juxtaposition of brilliant colors and dramatic content is a fundamental feature of the artist's notion of beauty-which is almost always accompanied by an underlying sense of horror. Yim's mode of expression bridges compelling dichotomies: luminosity and darkness, artificiality and organic matter, order and chaos, harmony and violence.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Nightshade (Simone SubalGallery, New York, NY, USA, 2023), Belladonna, (Olympia Gallery, New York, NY, 2023), Mie Yim: Saints, Shamans, and Batshit Crazies (Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, China, 2023), Fluid Boundaries (Brattleboro Art Museum, Brattleboro, VT, USA, 2022), Mie Yim: Mutants (Villa Magdalena, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, 2021). Recent group shows include Wonderland (Lehman Maupin, Seoul, South Korea, 2024), Cathartic Creatures (Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2023), and Notions (Canada, New York, NY, USA, 2023).