Background

Byron Kim was born in 1961, in La Jolla, California, United States.

Education

In 1983, Kim received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University. In 1986, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Career

In the early 1990's, Kim explored racial identity with his minimalist paintings. He gained early recognition for "Synecdoche", his contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the work, which embodied the aesthetic and political aspirations of the art in that year's exhibition. The work represents a grid of hundreds of monochrome "self-portraits". Each panel recreates the skin color of an individual, who sat for Kim, while he painted his/her portrait.

It was also in the early 1990's, that Byron collaborated with artist Glenn Ligon on "Black & White" (1993), the work, that constitutes part of a series, critiquing the "prejudices" of art materials, particularly the hues of "Flesh"-colored tubes of paint. The work, titled "46 Halsey Drive Wallingford CT" and created in 1995, recorded Kim's family members' various recollections of the color of a home the artist lived in, when he was a child.

Some of other works, created by Byron, represent details, such as the palms of the artist's hands, or the whorls in his children's hair. Throughout his career, Kim has also depicted landscapes and created photographic assemblages.

In addition, Kim works on his ongoing series of "Sunday Paintings", in which he records the appearance of the sky every week along with a diary entry and juxtaposes the cosmological with the quotidian.

During his career, Byron has participated in a number of exhibitions. His mid-career survey, "Threshold", traveled widely from the Berkeley Art Museum, California, to the Samsung Museum of Modern Art in Seoul and on to five other locations in the United States (2006-2007). He was included in the landmark exhibition "Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today", at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2008-2009). In 2014, Byron took part in the exhibition "Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s" at the Montclair Art Museum, which travelled to Telfair Museums, the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin. The following year, in 2015, the artist's work was presented at the Sharjah Biennial 12 (United Arab Emirates) and in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, titled "Pond Lily Over Mushroom Cloud: Byron Kim Adapts the Black on Black Cosmology of Maria Martinez".

In 2016, Kim participated in the group show "Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. In 2018, his work was presented at the 12th Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea. A significant selection of Kim's "Sunday Paintings" were exhibited in "Byron Kim: The Sunday Paintings" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in Ohio in late 2019.

In addition, in 2009 and again in 2012, Kim was appointed a senior critic in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.

Currently, he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Achievements

• Byron Kim is a well-known artist, who gained prominence for his abstractions. His best-known works include "Synecdoche" and "Sunday Paintings" series. "Synecdoche" was a watershed for the artist and has received much acclaim since its first showing in the 1993 Whitney Biennial.
  
  Kim attained numerous awards, including the Louise Nevelson Award in Art, New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, National Endowment of the Arts Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Robert De Niro Sr. Prize and others.
  
  The artist's works are kept in different permanent collections, including those of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, among many others.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • Belly Painting (Green)

  • Sky Blue Flag

• painting

  • Sunday Painting 12/6/15

  • Four Eagle Feathers

  • Sunday Painting 1/7/18

  • Untitled (for H.W.S.)

  • Blue Lift Sandalwood Fall

  • Sunday Painting (6/27/04)

  • Pathos Cosmos

  • Blue Night

  • Study for U.N. Painting (Looking South)

  • Bulbokjang #1

  • Layl Almadina (Halo 3)

  • Emmett at Twelve Months, #3

  • Synecdoche

  • Goryeo Green Glaze #1

  • Evidence of a Struggle

  • Maybe a Shadow Will Save You

  • Stain, Methylene Blue

  • Swastika

  • Pond Lily 1

  • Trinity, 16 Milliseconds After Detonation

  • Delacroix's Shadow

Views

Kim's work is situated between abstraction and representation, between conceptualism and pure painting. In his richly hued minimalist works, the artist seeks to push the edges of what people understand as abstract painting by using the medium to develop an idea, that typically gets worked out over the course of an ongoing series. Kim's paintings often appear to be pure abstractions, but upon investigation, they reveal a charged space, that often connects to the artist's personal experiences in relation to larger cultural forces.

Quotations: "I love a good abstract painting, but I'm often not interested in what people talk about, when they talk about abstraction, so I prefer to apply my own content."

Membership

During the time, when Kim studied at Yale University, he was a member of the Manuscript Society.

Interests

• Artists

  Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin