On View

In her quest to transcend her physical body and live forever, Marina Abramović has done a lot of weird stuff.
Throughout her career, this pioneer of durational performance art has pushed the limits of her body and mind, withstanding pain, exhaustion, and bodily harm in her pursuit of emotional and spiritual transformation—from a three-month sojourn across the Great Wall of China with her former partner Ulay in 1988 to her 700-hour-long performance The Artist Is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010.
But in recent years, she has been experimenting with different media in an effort to bestow her work an afterlife beyond her own. Some have been more successful than others. (I’ve locked eyes with a blank-faced hologram of the artist at the Serpentine Galleries, and even eaten her in macaron form). But in her latest effort to surpass this mortal coil, the Serbian artist has partnered with the Internet-based file transfer service WeTransfer on an immersive experience in London.
Yes, you read that right. Well, technically it’s WePresent, which is the company’s lesser-known digital arts platform, but you get the idea, and together they have created a pop-up Marina Abramović experience. Called “Traces,” the exhibition is set in the Old Truman Brewery in London’s vibrant Shoreditch neighborhood and features five rooms, each of which commemorates an object that has been important to her life and work over the past five decades.
General view at the preview of ‘Traces’ by Marina Abramovic and WePresent by WeTransfer, at Old Truman Brewery in London. Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for WePresent/WeTransfer.
The first room is dedicated to the Rose of Jericho, a desert plant that Abramović says embodies her faith in the power of life. Tripping on through to the second room, visitors will be met with a sure-to-be-popular moving-light show inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night. (The artist says the painting expresses something of her understanding of the cosmos, but even the Abramović fans among us can’t help being a little skeptical that this is not an effort to jump on the immersive Van Gogh bandwagon.)
In the third room, visitors sit around a big hunk of ancient quartz to experience Abramović’s 1991 work Crystal Cinema. Next, a bright room commemorates Susan Sontag’s crucial book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others; which the artist said helped cultivate her sensitivity to human pain. Finally, in a room dedicated to a rock from Mars, visitors can listen to a recording of her 2015 work reciting the names of 10,000 stars (within an installation that I can’t help but note resembles another much-hyped artist’s work: Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Balls).
Installation view, Marina Abramović, “Traces.” Photo by Naomi Rea.
In a wide-ranging discussion with Tim Marlow, the director of London’s Royal Academy, which will hold a postponed retrospective exhibition with the artist in 2023, Abramović opened up about her interest in building her legacy. “What is incredibly powerful about performance is that it is immaterial. There’s nothing there except for the memory of the audience left,” Abramović said, adding that it is difficult to maintain or cherish the energy of the work outside of these memories.
While some of her performances have been photographed, and she has flirted with the idea of works being re-performed after her death—“Your work is not yours anymore, you give it up to the universe,” she said—she noted that she would “never” give permission for someone to repeat some of her most dangerous pieces, such as Rhythm 0, a risky performance the artist undertook at Studio Morra in Naples in 1974, when she was just 23: for six hours, she invited visitors to use any number of 72 objects she had laid out on a table, which ranged from feathers to a saw, on her body in any way they chose. 
Installation view, Marina Abramović, “Traces.” Photo by Naomi Rea.
“I’m going to die one day—what do you do?” she said. “The digital is one solution, and mixed reality is another.” A digital version of the experience will run concurrently on WePresent (Abramović has been a guest curator on the platform for a year), alongside spotlights on five emerging performance artists and a digital manifestation of her masterclass, the Abramović Method.
The artist’s other recent experiments have included working in different styles of performance, such as opera—as in 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which debuted in Munich last year—and creating an immersive cinematic experience of the work, Seven Deaths, which is currently on view at Lisson Gallery.
Marina Ambramović’s “Traces” is on view through September 12 at the Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London. Tickets can be booked for free online.
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Street art and collectibles sensation–turned art market darling KAWS (born Brian Donnelly) unveiled his latest work at New York’s Rockefeller Center this week: an 18-foot-tall bronze sculpture perched above the ice skating rink where the famed Christmas tree lives during the holidays.
The piece, commissioned for the occasion, is titled SHARE, and features KAWS’s Mickey Mouse-like “Companion” character carrying a miniature “BFF” figure, a furry Elmo knockoff the artist first introduced in 2016. Both have the artist’s signature crossed-out eyes. The design was first introduced as a series of vinyl figurines in February 2020.
When deciding what work to create for the public art exhibition, “I was thinking about what this area means to me,” Donnelly said at the sculpture’s unveiling. “The verticality of all the architecture and visiting Rockefeller Center as a kid and looking up and being overwhelmed, I wanted a sculpture that could relate to those feelings.”
The artist KAWS unveils his new sculpture SHARE at Rockefeller Center in New York. The 18-foot-tall bronze figure features two of the artist’s iconic motifs, “COMPANION” and “BFF.” Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
“KAWS has created a universal language for anyone who interacts with his instantly recognizable figures,” E. B. Kelly, Tishman Speyer’s managing director overseeing Rockefeller Center, said in a statement. “KAWS’s work subverts expectations while feeling both familiar and stylized.”
Known for his cartoon aesthetic that draws on pop culture references from the Smurfs to the Simpsons, Donnelly is currently the subject of his first New York museum show, “KAWS: What Party,” on view at the Brooklyn Museum through September 5.
“What motivates me? I think communication and having a dialogue with people and having opportunities to put my work into the world,” the artist said, describing his work as “optimistic, personal, [and] inviting.”
In SHARE, the “Companion” is meant to represent a sense of sadness, fear, and isolation, while the smaller “BFF” doll it carries suggest the comfort that so many of us need.
“With the city opening up again and up coming out of the last year that we did, I feel like it’s a really important time to have public art,” Donnelly added.
See more photos of the work below.
KAWS, SHARE at Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
KAWS, SHARE at Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
KAWS, SHARE at Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
KAWS, SHARE at Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
The artist Brian Donnelly, better known as KAWS, unveils his new sculpture SHARE at Rockefeller Center in New York. The 18-foot-tall bronze figure features two of the artist’s iconic motifs, “COMPANION” and “BFF.” Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
“KAWS: SHARE” is on view at Rockefeller Center, 45 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, August 11–October 8, 2021.
“KAWS: What Party” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, February 26–September 5, 2021.
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Many artists throughout history have claimed some sort of otherworldly inspiration (the muses, for instance). But the visionary American artist Paulina Peavy (1901–1999) may be one of the only to attribute her talents to communications with a U.F.O.—specifically one named Lacamo. 
During Peavy’s lifetime, she enjoyed many early successes, including showing with Los Angeles’s Stendahl Gallery, studying with Hans Hoffman, and exhibiting work at the opening of the San Francisco Museum of Art—all before falling into art world obscurity.
The new exhibition “Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler,” on view at the Beyond Baroque art center in Venice Beach, is hoping to reintroduce Peavy as a powerful and one-of-a-kind creative force in the nascent southern California art scene of a century ago. 
Paulina Peavy, Untitled (circa 1930s–1980s). Courtesy of Beyond Baroque and the Paulina Peavy Estate.
The fascinating show, curated by Laura Whitcomb, marks the first exhibition of Peavy’s work on the West Coast in 75 years, and traces her myriad creations —paintings, films, drawings, intricate masks—from the 1930s into the 1980s. Various ephemera related to theosophy and astroculture are also on view in a series of vitrines, along with some of Peavy’s own writings, which detail the elaborate occultist belief systems that informed her work. 
Even before UFOs got involved (and we’ll get to that later), Peavy’s story was one against the odds. She was born in Colorado to a miner father and a Swedish immigrant mother. In 1906, the family moved to Portland in a covered wagon following the Oregon Trail. Peavy’s mother would die tragically a few years later. In spite of the gender conventions of the time and her own humble origins, Peavy would attend Oregon State College (now Oregon State University), studying art with Farley Doty McLouth and Marjorie Baltzell. After winning fourth place in a national competition hosted by the Art Students League in New York, Peavy was accepted to the Chouinard Art Institute to study with Hans Hofmann. 
Paulina Peavy holding masks. Photo by Sam Vandivert. Courtesy of Beyond Baroque.
In the 1920s, Peavy began to play a pivotal role in the emerging West Coast art scene. She established the Paulina Peavy Gallery, which also functioned as a salon and school, hosting classes for the Los Angeles Art Students League. Like many other artists of the age, Peavy had interests in the supernatural and was loosely affiliated with the occultist art group the Group of Eight, as well as the Synchromists and a group of West Coast surrealists led by artist Lorser Feitelson.
But her true moment of breakthrough came in 1932, when Peavy, by now the mother of two and in the midst of a divorce, attended a seance at the Santa Ana home of Ida L. Ewing, a pastor of the National Federation of Spiritual Science. During the seance, Peavy claimed to have encountered a discarnate entity she called Lacamo, which she later described as a “wondrous ovoid-shaped UFO.”  It was an event that would have a profound impact on Peavy and her work for the rest of her life—because Lacamo, she said, revealed great universal truths which she attempted to convey through her art. (She sometimes co-signed her works with Lacamo.) 
Paulina Peavy, Untitled (circa 1980). Courtesy of Beyond Baroque and the Paulina Peavy Estate.
At the core of these revelations was a complex cosmology consisting of 12,000-year cycles with 3,000-year seasons. The summer of these seasons harkened a kind of utopia in which human beings transcended the limits of their earthly bodies to become spirits, freed from their sexes and entering “one-gender perfection,” as well as a singular cosmic race. 
She also looked to other artists for inspiration. Peavy was fascinated by the Mexican muralists, particularly José Clemente Orozco who also shared a deep interest in hermetic and indigenous traditions, particularly philosopher José Vasconcelos’s belief that a great cosmic race would be born out of the Americas (Peavy exhibited 30 of her paintings at the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40, where Diego Rivera exhibited mural work. She also painted a 14-foot mural titled The Eternal Supper, depicting a “Last Supper” filled with androgynous, racially ambiguous figures for the 1939 San Francisco Exposition.)
In numerous drawings on view in the exhibition, one sees Peavy alluding to pyramidal shapes and the icon of the Pharaoh, an image that would remain central to her visual lexicon. Within her complex cosmology, the Egyptian era stood as paramount, but one can also see these forms as drawings from the Maya and Aztec lineages heralded by the muralists. 
Paulina Peavy, Untitled (circa 1930s–1980s). Courtesy of Beyond Baroque and the Paulina Peavy Estate.
Undoubtedly, the most striking part of the exhibition are Peavy’s paintings, in which androgynous faces appear against darkened foregrounds, veils and wisps of colors hauntingly hovering above. For Peavy, who didn’t title or date her works, these paintings were ongoing revelations, and many are the result of 50 years of experimentation. Starting in the 1930s, Peavy employed a signature technique of layering translucent colors, then later, in the 1970s and ‘80s, she often returned to these paintings adding abstract crystal shapes that she believed would make viewers’ more receptive to transcendence and Lacomo’s unearthly wisdom. 
“She was instructed [by Lacomo] that her painting could change viewers’ neural pathways so that the viewer could become, over time, a receiver. In other words, the paintings were meant to increase neuroplasticity that would make viewers more psychic and more receptive as channelers themselves,” said Whitcomb. 
Paulina Peavy, Ghazi Khan (circa 1950s). Courtesy of Beyond Baroque and the Paulina Peavy estate.
Another fascinating portion of the exhibition includes a collection of intricately adorned masks that offer a window into Peavy’s practice as a channeler. As art objects, these many-layered masks, which she would wear while communicating with Lacamo, straddle both Surrealist objects and indigenous traditions. As with many women artists before her, Peavy also worked in costume design. In college, she had drawn Surrealist costumes for Oregon State’s newspaper. Later, in New York, she helped support herself by making costume designs for a fashion house. 
Still, everything Peavy created was primarily intended to celebrate her belief system. “Paulina considered herself a philosopher and wrote a number of manuscripts, but most poignantly made films which could elucidate her cosmology,” said exhibition curator Laura Whitcomb. Yet, in her time, these beliefs cast Peavy out of the mainstream art world.
“She has this incredible pedigree where she showed with Delphic Studios—Alma Reed’s gallery—and alongside Agnes Pelton. Peavy was articulate, intelligent, very well educated in the arts, but when she identified her discarnate entity Lacomo, in the aftermath of the war, when there was this fear and anxiety over the UFO phenomenon and the Roswell incident, everyone dropped her and thought she was absolutely crazy,” explained Whitcomb. “These were dangerous ideas to be affiliated with and could get you in a lot of trouble, even on an FBI list.”
Peavy at work in her studio. Courtesy of Beyond Baroque.
Peavy made her way henceforth by selling her work, not through galleries but through Albert Bender’s Space Review, one of the most important periodicals of UFO culture of the era, and showing work in astroculture conventions. “She became something of an astroculture celebrity,” said Whitcomb. “She realized the art world was very fearful.” 
Now, times have changed and spiritualist women artists such as Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, and Agnes Pelton are widely celebrated. “In the lead up to the Second World War, many artists were experimenting with the occult—Artaud was casting spells against Hitler. And the past years have been very scary,” said Whitcomb. “I feel like recent interest in the occult had to do with creating a cosmic balance and then we’re reminded of artists’ roles as shamans.” 
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A legendary figure who fought against and transformed the rigidity of the art world, French-American sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle has finally received a well-earned U.S. reception honoring her trailblazing artwork at MoMA PS1.
During her five decade-long career, the French-born, New York City-raised artist fearlessly defied categorical constraints to explore a boundless artistic practice. And the MoMA PS1 exhibition, underwritten by Swiss luxury skincare house La Prairie and entitled “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life,” over 200 works spanning sculpture, drawings, video, and more reveal the vast expanse of Saint Phalle’s imagination and a steadfast dedication to her craft.
Niki de Saint Phalle, L’Estrella Carta No. XVII (The Star) (1997). © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
As a child, Saint Phalle was subjected to a violent and tumultuous household. Deeply rooted trauma stemming from emotional and physical abuse would remain with Saint Phalle throughout her entire life. But rather than letting it swallow her, Saint Phalle channeled tragedy into an artistic practice.
At her psychiatrist’s recommendation, she began to translate the lingering pain of her early life into paintings. With the intention of creating joy, she began to adopt a visual vocabulary of almost childlike iconography, using a distinct palette of primary colors to build worlds of optimism and hope. 
From the onset, Saint Phalle’s practice explored human complexities. She welcomed hard-hitting subject matter, closely analyzing, for example, the treatment of women in society, and sought to transform and transcend these themes into a utopian existence.
In this way, Saint Phalle gifted herself a form of escapism from the sadness she carried. Play would also remain at the heart of Saint Phalle’s work throughout the entirety of her career, something she acknowledged kept her from falling into the pitfalls of depression. Though many in the mainstream art world would reject inviting in such a concept, for fear of not being taken seriously, Saint Phalle brilliantly adopted frivolity as a mechanism by which to connect with audiences around the world. 
Niki de Saint Phalle, La fontaine Stravinsky (c. 1983). Photo: Green Moon Marketing. © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
From the onset of her public life, Saint Phalle was unafraid to rebel against the expectations placed upon women. Called by Gloria Steinem “the first free woman I have ever seen,” her practice was purposefully loud and unapologetic. Carving out a lane for herself during the 1950s was no easy feat. Women at this time were both explicitly and implicitly instructed to take up little space, remain submissive to their male counterparts, marry young and live for the sole purpose of producing children and taking care of the home.
Though Saint Phalle began her adult life entering into the roles of wife and mother, she would reclaim her life through her artistic practice. She soon found herself part of a close-knit artist community made up of almost entirely men, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Jean Tinguely, who would become her second husband. 
Though Saint Phalle first began garnering attention for “Tirs,” a body of paintings produced by firing a gun at plaster reliefs that released pockets of paint, her work would be cemented into the iconography of art history via the “Nanas” series. As female-inspired figures with curvy, exaggerated bodies, Saint Phalle’s “Nanas” looked toward art history and the ways in which women have been depicted since ancient times, and additionally looked to dismantle notions of the female form as a kind of object. The “Nanas” were eye-catching, bold, and highly memorable, nurturing an ongoing dialogue.
Niki de Saint Phalle, “Mini Nana maison” (c. 1968). © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
A key aspect of the “Nanas” that existed elsewhere in Saint Phalle’s practice is a “disarming simplicity,” a term coined by Ruba Katrib, curator of “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life.” The undertones of the artist’s work were always far more complex than what the visual language might offer. Saint Phalle did not want to isolate audiences with complexities; rather, she invited the masses to enjoy her work as a shared human experience. “Her Nanas confront Western standards of femininity and decorum: they are brash, ecstatic, and embrace sexuality,” noted Katrib, in a statement from La Prairie. “She created her Nanas at such a large scale specifically so that they could dominate – literally tower over – men. Saint Phalle was also an iconoclast in her personal style and way of life.”
Though always intrinsically a part of Saint Phalle’s work, political and social issues would become more obviously woven into the artist’s work toward the latter part of her career. 
Niki de Saint Phalle, book cover of AIDS, You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands (1986). Photo: NCAF Archives. © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
During the 1980s, as AIDS enveloped her community, Saint Phalle used her established platform to create work that directly called out the systems at play for insufficiently addressing the crisis.
Much of the work she would create at this time and in the decades until her death in 2002 feel astoundingly contemporary, especially as climate change, inadequate social and political leadership, and corruption remain crucial issues. 
La Prairie’s Nighttime Oil from the Skin Caviar collection. Photo courtesy La Prairie.
La Prairie’s involvement in “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life” is a seamless fit for the brand, which has  taken inspiration from Niki de Saint Phalle’s monumental career since 1982, when the La Prairie team first encountered her work—and her compelling use of cobalt blue, which she once described as “the color of joy and luck”—in a shared New York design studio.
With an oeuvre of work that welcomed many forms of creating as a means to self-fund her more ambitious projects, Saint Phalle was, at the time, working on producing her own perfume, Flacon de Parfum. From then on, the cobalt blue of Saint Phalle’s perfume bottle would go on to serve as the direct inspiration for the color of La Prairie’s iconic Skin Caviar Collection. This Fall, the iconic collection goes beyond lifting and firming, and journeys into the depths of the Cobalt Night with the Skin Caviar Nighttime Oil, imbued with Caviar Retinol. An innovative, Bauhaus-inspired, double-glass encasement houses and protects an elusive and powerful new ingredient—Caviar Retinol—derived from La Prairie’s legendary Swiss caviar extract. Niki de Saint Phalle committed her life toward progressivism, so too has La Prairie demonstrated an unwavering duty to pioneering discoveries. 
For more content, see the below links. 
Art Basel x NikiLa Prairie x MoMA PS1: “Encountering Niki” Art TalkLA Prairie on Niki de Saint Phalle
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Michelangelo’s famed Sistine Chapel is coming to cities across the U.S. thanks to high-resolution, nearly full-scale reproductions of the artist’s famed frescoes.
“Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition” has been touring the globe since 2015, and previously went on view in New York beneath the soaring ribbed ceiling of Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus at the World Trade Center in 2017, under the title “Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.”
The latest iteration of the show, which has opened in Chicago, San Antonio, and Charlotte, North Carolina, and will soon be back in New York, seems to have been retooled to capitalize on the newfound popularity of the runaway hit “Immersive Van Gogh.”
The earlier chapel presentation struck a scholarly note, with detailed wall texts identifying the figures in the paintings. And despite the Oculus’s location inside a mall, the brightly lit space recalled the classic white cube gallery. More

In 2018, Chinese-Indonesian art collector Budi Tek announced an unprecedented partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that effectively granted the museum—vis-a-vis a dedicated foundation—co-ownership of his vaunted collection of contemporary Chinese art.
Now, for the first time, a selection of art from that trove is on view at LACMA. Twenty pieces from Tek’s collection make up the new exhibition “Legacies of Exchange,” including works by Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Qiu Anxiong, among others.
The show “highlights works that relate to cross-cultural exchange, both recent and historical, between China and the West,” said Susanna Ferrell, LACMA’s assistant curator of Chinese Art who organized the show, in a statement.
The first of the show’s two sections brings together examples of Chinese artists in conversation with historical European paintings. In a 2006 canvas, for instance, Zhou Tiehai reimagines Jacopo Palma’s Venus and Cupid with the mascot for Camel cigarettes standing in for the Roman Goddess. In a 1997 painting, Yue Minjun recreates the central young girl in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas as a hysterical pink man.
The second half of the exhibition, meanwhile, looks at the ways in which artists have appropriated the language of commercial advertising in their work, such as in Huang Yong Ping’s 1997 installation Da Xian: The Doomsday. The piece comprises a trio of larger-than-life porcelain bowls filled with boxes of cereal that all give the same expiration date: July 1, 1997, the day of Hong Kong’s handover to China.
Yue Minjun, Infanta (1997). © Yue Minjun. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
A prominent entrepreneur, Tek began collecting art in 2004. By 2014, he had amassed a personal collection of more than 1,000 pieces and founded a 9,000-square-foot private institution—the Yuz Museum in Shanghai—to house it all. Then came an unfortunate turn: The following year, Tek was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Just as quickly as his museum opened its doors, Tek was forced to decide its long-term future. After China denied attempts to make the Yuz Museum public, Tek turned to Michael Govan, LACMA’s CEO and director, with an alternative idea. Their eventual collaboration yielded a new foundation to oversee the collection, which would live in China but otherwise travel between LACMA and the Yuz museum for temporary exhibitions.
Likewise, the foundation is governed by a board of trustees made up equally of representatives from LACMA and the Yuz Museum.
“I said to Michael Govan, ‘Now we are like a husband and wife. You don’t vote by saying I’m one percent bigger than you—you can’t outvote someone,’” Tek told Artnet News in 2018.
The first fruits of the partnership came in the form of “In Production: Art and the Studio System,” an exhibition of works from LACMA’s collection that brought in over 20,000 visitors to the Yuz Museum in 2019. 
See more images from “Legacies of Exchange” below.
Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
Wang Guangyi, Joseph Beuys’ Dead Hare (1994). © Wang Guangyi. Photo: Arnold Lee, Dijon Yellow Imaging.
Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
Qiu Anxiong, The Doubter 2010). © Qiu Anxiong. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Wang.
Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
“Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” is on view now through March 13, 2022 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris has opened a new solo show featuring works by Damien Hirst, making it his first museum show in France.
The artist, best known for making artworks out of dissected sharks, pill cabinets, and suspended animals, recently made a return to painting to realize a 107-piece series of canvases featuring flowering cherry blossoms inspired by Pointillism and Impressionism.
Thirty of the works are now on view at Cartier’s Paris-based foundation through next January.
The works present branches laden with blossoms in white, maroon, pink, and green, all depicted in short, thick brushstrokes with elements of gestural painting that nod to Action Painting. More

This week, the Korean public got its first chance to see a smattering of artworks from the multi-billion-dollar collection amassed by the late Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee. 
Two shows dedicated to Lee’s former possessions went on view at major venues in Seoul Wednesday, July 21. The events marked the first time that any pieces from his collection have gone on public display since being conferred to two institutions in April. 
The National Museum of Korea unveiled a presentation of historical artifacts from the Lee collection, including 28 pieces designated by the state as National Treasures. The 77 objects on view represent just a fraction of the more than 21,600 items donated to the institution by Lee’s heirs. 
Meanwhile, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) opened an exhibition of 58 Modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures by 34 Korean artists selected from the almost 1,500 artworks gifted from the Lee collection. 
Jeong Seon, Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang (1751). Courtesy of the National Museum of Korea.
“We selected items that have artistic and historic value for this exhibition,” National Museum curator Lee Soo-kyung said during a press preview, according to the Korea Herald. “Our main purpose is to show the characteristics of Lee Kun-hee’s collection.”
On view in the two-month-long National Museum exhibition are rare examples of paintings, porcelain, metal statues, and wooden furniture dating from the prehistoric era to the early 20th century. The highlight of the group is Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang, a 1751 landscape painting by Joseon-period artist Jeong Seo. It’s thought to be the Samsung chairman’s first major art purchase.
“A large part of the 1,488 artworks donated to our museum from Lee’s collection is Modern art, which our museum has a shortage of,” Park Mi-hwa, curator of the MMCA exhibition, explained in a preview of that institution’s show.
“Accordingly, for the first of our special exhibitions featuring the donated Lee collection, we selected Modern art pieces by Korea’s most popular artists.” Among those represented in the exhibition are landscape painter Byeon Gwansik, abstractionist Kim Whanki, and sculptor Kwon Jinkyu.
The historic gifts to the two museums this spring ended a months’-long debate about the fate of the more than 23,000 works of art following Lee’s death in October of 2020.

MMCA 이건희컬렉션 특별전: 한국미술명작국립현대미술관 서울2021. 7. 21. ~ 2022. 3. 13.
MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection: Masterpieces of Korean Art MMCA Seoul21. Jul. 2021 ~ 13. Mar. 2022 pic.twitter.com/gVnh6rQK2c
— 국립현대미술관 (@MMCAKOREA) July 20, 2021

Media outlets had previously speculated that Lee’s heirs, including his son Lee Jae-yong and widow Hong Ra-hee, might sell some of the prized artworks to international buyers in order to cover the $11 billion (₩12.5 trillion) inheritance tax bill on the $20 billion (₩ 22 trillion) fortune the chairman left behind.
Ultimately, the heirs chose to keep the collection in the country, distributing its pieces among state institutions, including the National Museum, MMCA, and the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art.
But the artworks, owned by the state, won’t stay in these institutions for long. Earlier this month, the South Korean minister of culture, sports, and tourism, announced plans to build a new museum solely dedicated to the Lee collection. 
Reservations to see the National Museum show are booked for the next month, a spokesperson for the museum told the Herald.
Tickets to see the MMCA show aren’t quite as hard to get. There, reservations are unavailable through early August, per Korea JoongAng Daily. 
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